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About the Crater Lake NP Oral
History Series
Were
people charged to go through the Park on Highway 62?
They were charged to go
through the Park on 62, that’s right. They didn’t like it much. People
didn’t care much for it. The trucks, of course, were kept out as they are now.
If there was much of an argument and there usually wasn’t, there weren’t very
many people that argued about it, but they were told that if you don’t like it
you could turn around and go back and go around by the other way, down by
Klamath Falls and across to Medford if that’s what you wish, in the politest
terms that you could use.
The
west and south were manned all year long?
No, it was just during
the summertime that the west and the south were manned. And then we moved an
entrance station. I think it was an extra entrance station. It shows in some of
these pictures. It was that heavy log entrance station. I think it was put up
here in the utility yard during the summertime and then was moved down there in
the fall and put right into the middle of the road pretty much directly in front
of the old log house.
Okay,
it could be anchored. It looks like in the pictures it was a permanent fixture.
No, it wasn’t. I’m sure
that it was moveable. I’m sure it was moved in the fall. We had tent houses that
sat back in the woods. You couldn’t see them from the road. It was where the
seasonal rangers lived. Of Course, we didn’t have to be concerned about the
mixing of sexes in those days cause all seasonal rangers were men. There were no
women seasonal rangers. So we had, I think it was, four or five live at each
station and at the north. I don’t recall how many seasonal rangers we had in
all. There were probably about sixteen or seventeen.
Was
this building, the Ranger Dorm, occupied at that time?
Yes, it was.
But it
was all male? There were no females?
No, there were females in
here, too, because some were clerks.
They
would have been Permanent staff who would have been in here.
No, they were seasonal,
too. There could have been permanent secretaries that came up from Medford. But
I’m a little hazy on how many secretaries or female workers there were that came
from Medford.
Ethel
Wilkinson was the only one I know of who was Permanent and she stayed, I think
until ‘47
To get back to the duties
a little bit, it sounds like we did nothing. That’s not true we did a lot of
things. A lot of it had to do with shoveling places out and keeping fire
hydrants shoveled out all the time. We had to take the weather every day.
The weather station at that time was down by the firehouse. I think that it now
is back behind the Administration Building. But it was at that time by the
firehouse and we had to climb the snow bank and then trudge back to that to take
the weather every morning and then every afternoon. It sounds like a small job,
it didn’t take too long. But it was a job that we had to do. There, even
in the forties, there was paperwork to be done. There were reports to be
written, like the Chief Ranger’s monthly report. In those days, there was a
Superintendent’s monthly report that went from the Superintendent of each park,
to Region, and then went on to Washington.
Now
that was curtailed in the early fifties?
No, it was later than
that. Because when I was in Washington in the sixties we were still getting
monthly reports in; it was curtailed during that part of the time.
We
have very good records from the National Archives for some of the stuff, but
after ’53 it’s really difficult to talk about the following decades.
Well, I’ll be darned. I
used to write the Superintendent’s monthly report at Bryce. A good deal of it,
and that was ’56-’58. I’m quite sure that we’ve still got them, because they
would be circulated in the Washington office and I was in the Washington office
from ’66-’69. But I think it stopped before ’69. They decided it was a waste of
time. It was a waste of time.
Some
of that may have been a problem because I know the other Federal Records
Centers, like San Bruno, may have picked up some of those reports.
I want to digress just a
little bit. There was a fellow in the southwest who wrote some of the most
fantastic reports. His name escapes me right at the moment. But he’s a famous
individual of the southwest. He wrote great reports. They were priceless. Later
in the year the roofs around here, although they are built and were built for
snow loads, they still had to be relieved. Particularly the places that people
lived in, because there was a melting factor there. You had the heat that came
out of the building that built up an ice ring around or on your eaves around the
houses. It could be from February on when we had to relieve the roofs around
here of ice and snow. This was a matter of chopping, and it was a matter of
taking wires and cutting the snow. You’d anchor one end of a cable to like a
tree and then hook the other one to a cat and pull this down across your snow
which would cut it off. And then you could cut it off or slide it off or then
cut it with a shovel to get it off. When it got deep enough alongside the
house, you’d have to take a cat with blade and go along the long ways of the
building and shove that snow away. Sometimes you’d have to take it for a hundred
to get it away from the houses. These three houses that are up here, these small
ones up here, where we lived later on, we had to shove that snow clear down by
that old Hospital Building to get rid of it, away from those houses.
It was
pushed over the side?
Right. When we went to
take snow off the buildings around here, everybody that wasn’t gainfully
occupied or doing something else took park in taking the snow off. Because
there weren’t enough of us that you could just say, “This crew of six is going
to take care of the snow.” You wouldn’t know because of days off and because of
snowplowing and this sort of thing. You wouldn’t know that you would have a crew
of six. The Ranger force pitched in right along with everybody else. We did have
wildlife patrols in the fall. We had hunting patrols that were pretty constant,
particularly on the east side of the Park where there were roads that ran
virtually within sight of the boundary. I don’t know whether they are still
there or not but they were in those days. So, it was quite common to find
somebody that was awfully close, and occasionally to find somebody inside the
Park hunting over there and then on the south side too, particularly on the
southeast side or the east side of Annie Creek. There were roads right up to the
Park there. And so we patrolled those quite frequently and quite a bit.
Did
you have problems with fires those years?
Yes, we had some. During
the period of ’46-’50, we never had a big fire at Crater Lake. We had some that
may have gone two or three acres. I can remember going to one which we thought
might be in the Park. It was a Goose Egg or Goose Nest, which is just outside
the Park to the south and we had to hike in quite a ways. I can remember taking
a crew in there and it was probably about a two acre fire. But it actually was
in the National Forest, not in the Park. And that’s the biggest fire that I
served on while I was in the Park. The rest of them were primarily spot fires.
Were
there Interagency Agreements at that time?
Yes.
You
didn’t get detailed out?
We didn’t get detailed
out. However, you could get detailed out to another park. It just so happened
that none of us here did at that time. We had Fire Schools every year. In those
days there were Regional Fire Schools, you would get together at a place like
Mount Rainier or Lassen. Lassen is the Park that I went to a couple of times,
once from Olympic, and once, as I recall from Crater Lake, for a Spring Fire
School. It was a kind of a get together of Rangers. You got to know people from
different parks and you got to know the Fire people from San Francisco, which is
where the Regional Office was in those days-it was Region Four which covers the
whole West Coast. We had Hawaii at that time. It can sound like we had very
little to do in wintertime, but I can guarantee you that we managed to keep
busy. I know as far as my wife and I were concerned, we didn’t have cabin fever.
I can recall that when you were on our tour the other day, somebody mentioned
cabin fever. I’m sure that there might have been one or two wives that id have
cabin fever. Now it was a lot harder on the women than it was ever on the men
because the men were out every day. Even though it got old fighting the snow
sometime, as least you were out doing something else. Sometimes I think even in
those days, and I was a lot stupider then than I am now, that I did feel sorry
for my wife having to stay in all the time, because at that time she was taking
care of our oldest son and then we had another son while we were here. She had
two small children to take care of. When they went out to play, why of course,
these was all the snow equipment and everything that you had to bundle them up
in to get them outside and probably in about five minutes they had to come back
inside again to go to the bathroom or something. Even in those days, I did feel
sorry for these women, and there were people that had more than four kids.
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About the Crater Lake NP Oral
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