Other
Designed Features along Rim Drive
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Signs
Customized signage for Rim
Drive evolved from a CCC project begun in 1936 at Park
Headquarters that aimed to replace various types of
metal signs posted throughout the park. Enrollees
produced hand-carved wood signs of varying sizes with
raised letters painted chrome orange (for visibility at
night) against a dark brown background, based on Lange's
drawings of entrance, directional, and building signs.
Their production and placement greatly accelerated over
the summer of 1938 after establishing an outdoor
workshop at the CCC camp near Annie Spring. Lange
reported that 200 signs had been completed by November,
including some that identified parking areas and points
of interest on Rim Drive. Through photographs in his
season-ending report, he attempted to show how this type
of sign possessed good visibility, if properly placed,
for conveying mileage and direction on Rim Drive. These
examples included signs mounted in a triangular
configuration at road junctions and others slotted into
bollards.
East Entrance
motif. |
CCC enrollees produced more
signs at Camp Oregon Caves over the following winter and
began installing them upon returning to Crater Lake for
the 1939 season. They reestablished a workshop at the
park that summer for a crew of fifteen men to carve,
assemble, and then place eighty signs. Lange provided
"field sketch details" as drawings for the crew to
follow as he had the previous year, but the signs
completed that year varied somewhat more in size and
shape because of emphasis on the individualization of
signs for points of interest located along Rim Drive.
Although he originally expected to complete the project
by October, the shift away from standardization may have
accounted for why the crew did not finish installation
of the remaining signs until 1940.
The sign project's apparent
success stood in sharp contrast to the lack of
orientation markers or literature describing each of the
observation stations, ideas once advanced by Merriam and
embraced to some degree by the naturalists. At one point
Assistant Superintendent and Chief Park Naturalist
Donald Libbey had plans drawn to install markers similar
to one on top of Pilot Butte in Bend, but he transferred
before the NPS could fund the project. Lange's
recommendation in 1935 for a "binocular instrument" at
each of the observation stations quickly dropped off the
list of prospective projects, as did the suggestion from
Merriam about placing inconspicuous holders for
interpretive literature targeted specifically at the
stations and substations. The latter probably resulted
when no one came forward to implement the recommendation
by Merriam that experts produce literature for each of
these stations, even after Howel Williams began his
classic study of the park's geology in 1936 and actively
continued his fieldwork through 1939
View of the
lake from a point on the rim above Grotto Cove.
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