Design and Construction of Circuit Roads
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Only one road ran through
Crater Lake National Park when Congress established it
on May 22, 1902. The Fort Klamath — Jacksonville wagon
road served as an approach route for visitors to the
lake, though they still needed to follow a trail marked
by blazes for the final 2.5 miles to the rim. A better
road on the other side of the Cascade Divide (one going
through Munson Valley) reached the site later called Rim
Village in 1905, but those desiring to do a circuit
around Crater Lake were faced with a cross-country pack
trip lasting several days.
The first clamor for a circuit
road came from park founder William G. Steel, but only
after he started a concession company to provide visitor
services at Crater Lake in 1907. Steel told one
newspaper that the road's construction was imminent that
September, an announcement that largely stemmed from his
optimism about public and private investment at Crater
Lake, as fueled by visits from Secretary of the Interior
James R. Garfield and railroad magnate Edward H.
Harriman, president of the Southern Pacific. Garfield
left office after the presidential election of 1908,
while Harriman died soon thereafter, but Steel continued
his pursuit of funding for roads both to and within the
park through the Oregon congressional delegation. His
first taste of success in this regard came in June 1910,
when Congress appropriated $10,000 for the Army Corps of
Engineers to make a survey and provide estimates for
future road construction at Crater Lake.
A party of twenty-six men
began work to prepare plans, specifications, and
estimates for a park road system in August. The engineer
in charge came to Crater Lake having studied a
topographic map and quickly becoming convinced that a
"main highway" or "boulevard" following the rim was
feasible, with roads and trails to points of interest
radiating from it. As the center of circulation, such a
road followed long established precedents, given how
circuits for riding and walking had served as the
standard way of viewing European parks since the
eighteenth century. Prominent landscape designers in the
United States during the middle part of the nineteenth
century like Andrew Jackson Downing embraced this
convention as the desire for public and private parks
spread across the Atlantic. It was Downing who provided
a hierarchy of service, approach, and circuit roads in
his work, and this heavily influenced the design of
circulation systems in American national parks. The
concept of a circuit road could also be applied at
various scales, particularly where this device presented
visitors with appealing views and distant prospects. For
these reasons surveyors considered a road encircling the
lake to be of "first importance," in that it should
follow the "ridges and high points along the crater rim
on account of the view." Approach roads to Crater Lake,
by contrast, were to possess little in the way of scenic
features.
