Early Stories from Ranger Lloyd Smith

Back in 1959-60 a national park photographer came to Crater Lake to take photos. They put out a folder the next year about working in the national parks. I was featured on the cover working with two stone masons rebuilding the rock wall at North Junction. Can you imagine, no shirt…no hardhat and I was featured…so unsafe. That is me on the left at age 19.

Rangering in the ’80s at Crater Lake National Park

Park Rangers do many things at their jobs, including helping people in distress. Crater Lake is a very long way from normal medical service, so when something happens, a  heart attach from the high altitude at the Rim or falling off a bicycle, these first-line of safety are the boys in green! Thanks to Lloyd and Larry Smith for these photos.

Car Crashes Lloyd Smith 7
Car Crashes Lloyd Smith 4
Car Crashes Lloyd Smith 3
Lloyd Smith’s ranger vehicle
Lloyd Smith

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The Eidson Family Goes to Crater Lake – Twice

Crater Lake Institute receives all sorts of memorabilia from family visits or the CCC units that worked there. This one is especially nice for the quality of the surviving scrapbooks of two visits, one in 1958 and the second in 1964. The bear poster was a handout at the park gate.

Earl and Alice Eidson

This from their daughter: Their names were Earl and Alice (Robin) Eidson. They met at Fresno State College, where Earl was attending on the GI Bill after WWII – he was in the 86th Infantry Division, active in both theatres.  She was born in Great Falls, Montana but the family moved when her father got a position as a flight instructor in Tulare, CA. They were married after my mom finished college in 1951 in Fresno, and they moved to Salinas, CA where Dad first taught math and history at junior high, then math at high school.

He stayed in the reserves as a sergeant major until Fort Ord retired his unit, which I mention only because I’m sure you can imagine what it was like to get in trouble with your father the retired Sergeant Major/math teacher: the whole neighborhood knew. The first time they went to Crater Lake – the 1953 trip – was part of a trip that took them to Victoria, Canada and then heading home. It was Crater Lake, Olympia, Salem, and Columbia River Gorge, Vancouver and Victoria.

Bevan-gate-pass-front
Bevan-gate-pass
Crater Lake Informational Brochure 1952-1

[Crater Lake Institute has this 1952 edition in their collection. See it here]

My dad’s mom was a native Californian, and so he had some 24 great aunts and uncles in California. My great grandfather was a cattle rancher and inspector who, among other things, worked on the hoof and mouth eradication in 1929 in Yosemite/Tulare; one of my great uncles was a ranger at Kings Canyon, and I have three cousins who were born in Yosemite Valley.

If Dad’s family was thinking about taking a drive, there was always a relative to visit (Winters, Manteca, Alpaugh, Gridley, Firebaugh, Button Willow…), trees in bloom somewhere, or a birthday to celebrate – and I’m so fortunate that there was also a photo or two to take. It was my dad’s father who had the photography bug – and passed it on all over the family. I grew up playing with empty film canisters and reels.

The 1963 trip [the second trip] was to visit my mom’s relatives in Great Falls, Montana; they also visited the Great Salt Lake, Sale Lake City, Las Vegas, Carson City, & Helena.

Here’s the park permit from 1963  and a photo of  my dad, my brother and me at the park then. I would have been three, my brother seven.


Family shot on the Rim. The author peaks at the lake in front of dad.

Crater Lake Institute was happy to get this personal view of the park. While we focus on the inner workings, staff and history of Crater Lake, this other side is just as important. Thanks for sharing, Jimmy Rae.

 

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Our Website Guy Goes Backpacking

I freely admit it, I can’t make big mileages hiking if I stop to do these paintings. I’m fast, but not THAT fast, so, I’ve learned to shorten my goals, keep it realistic – and enjoy myself. For this, I get art to take home, my old body thanks me for slowing down, and by taking care I get to come back again and again to do this. And one more perk that is the difference between hiking and making art. I get to actually LOOK at the landscape, see how it’s built and has evolved. I see and understand how the flowers grow beside that dainty little brook where it spills out of the lake. Or how the trail crews have built a little path of rocks hauled over from a scree pile possibly 50 years ago. Putting in mileage sure doesn’t get you this close connection – but making trail art does.

Fleabane-beside-the-creek

These paintings represent places that moved me enough to stop and draw. On this trip, fourth of the season, I didn’t take my paints, but instead just a pencil, long point pencil sharpener and some water color paper. The color was added back in my studio, and I loved reliving the trip in this way. It took less art-making time on the trail, yet provided a ‘second adventure’ for me here at home reliving the same places again. I recommend it, really!

Sunset-trail-toward-the-peak

In this painting, I liked the way the soft light from distant fires softened up the sky, made companion colors in the willows fit perfectly as they yellowed for fall. The fleabane flowers beside the creek were about spent, with only a few yellow and white petals remaining – but it was a beautiful little place with water gurgling by. Willows, their leaves chomped on here and there by the black-tailed deer, were sporting galls and little caterpillar cocoons awaiting first freeze so they could spend their winter safe under snow on the ground.  The place looked felt very soft and settled. Both these paintings were created at places where I was also tired of walking, so it was good timing to take time, calm down, make some art.

As I hiked along and came into a big meadow, the vertical peaks of the Olympics really contrasted my view. Flat and stable, then vertical and jagged, rising fast and steep. That’s what these Olympic Mountains are, really steep. The Dungeness River starts up here and drops 7600 feet in only 28 miles to the Pacific Ocean, one of the steepest watersheds in the country. Ah, but those first dozen miles at the top, they’re just pure magic. One of the side secondary rivers begins here in this valley, surrounded by snowy peaks and a chain of lakes. Not a single lowland trail comes here, they’re all high subalpine or high-elevation trails that drop down into this magic place, giving it a Shangri-La feeling bounded by barriers on all sides.

Waytrail down into the valley below. A real knee killer.

 

Steep slopes and narrow valleys – Olympic National Park

 

Mountain-Gentian

Gentian : gen shen Gentians are fall-blooming plants of subalpine wet meadows. They’re one of my favorite flowers because they start blooming as summer is fading, being downright gutsy about their timing. They grow in clusters from a solitary root, and are at first tightly zipped up, a dark midnight blue that is truly rare in color. I don’t know another alpine flower with this amazingly vibrant blue. As they open, the insides begin to show lighter shades of cobalt, and again this is color not often seen in the wild, anywhere. They’re spectacular, to say the least I can about a plant that’s learned to flower just before first frost. What timing!

Orange Mountain-dandelion

On the other side of the color spectrum, a nose-up look at these plants that were upslope and out in the open from the gentians showed an orange mixed with white, just a tad of white to tone it down. And a little bee getting a meal. This was an upclose and personal painting – the flowers are only two inches wide, max. Orange mountain-dandelion has a hyphen, meaning it’s not a real dandelion, but one that looks similar to it’s backyard relatives. I found these in a much drier place than the gentian but still beside the trail. Both give great color to a drying meadow in late August.

My Six Moon Designs Lunar Duo was a bit too spacious for just me, but I luxuriously lounged in it, spread my stuff all over the place like I lived there. I guess I did. It’s an amazingly big tent for its 45 ounces of weight. This tent, and the other ultralight gear is what’s getting me into these places these days, and allowing me to do it in comfort.

At this campsite, an outcropping of boulders provided some really good reflections in the little lake, and so a painting was needed. Oh, I could have just turned the paper upside down and drawn it a second time, but that’s cheating, and not very accurate. Beside me while I drew, this Olympic chipmunk joined me. The Olympic Peninsula has several endemic mammals that live only here. This is one, and possibly my favorite. It’s small, even looks small with its short nose. This moment, with the chippy and me, my pencil and paper, are what makes my hiking complete – close connections with nature that will remain in my mind throughout the winter.

Olympic Chipmunk, only found in these mountains.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

 

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More Bears from Lloyd Smith

Crater Lake Bears by Lloyd Smith

Very few people have witnessed this. When Larry [Smith] and I first started working at Crater Lake in 1959 the park dug garbage pits and dumped the park’s garbage into the pits and burned it each day. Sometimes our garbage people would wait until the end of the day to burn to be nice to the bears. The garbage from the lodge and cafeteria were rich in dumped food.

The bears turned into entitled pigs and would all descend into the pits near headquarters and rummage through the burning garbage.We used to go down after work and watch the bears and shoot photos. When friends visited we would take them to the pits. The first photo is of me trying to “feed” the bear. We were young and not afraid. The bears had a regular run; they would start in the Mazama Campground then stop by the burning garbage and then head up to the Rim and scavenger the food in the Rim Campground. At one time I counted 21 bears around the garbage pit and in the trees. The park knew they had a problem. 

They put out bear warning pamphlets to put your food away in the campground. They made the bear-proof garbage cans. They closed the Rim Campground. Then they decided to close the pits and trucked the garbage out of the park.

Now you had druggie type/entitled bears used to free food…much better than leaves and berries. We had some people hurt. I have done first aid on bear injuries. One night a camper asked me if I could get a bear out his van that was going through his food boxes. I have been chased by a bear. Slowly the park trapped the bears and moved them outside the park. Some were tranquilized and moved. Some were shot…no other choice. The mothers had trained their kids to beg. We had them storming to the cabins looking for food.

Helen even chased one out of our cabin entrance with a broom. One day Helen was in our cabin and Kenneth was playing in the sandbox they had in the area for kids. Helen looked out and saw a bear walk between our cabin and Kenneth. Helen remained calm and the bear kept on walking. The bear was more interested in food rather than kids.

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Lloyd’s Bears

In the good ole days at Crater Lake when rangers had the morning patrol shift one of my first jobs was to cruise the campgrounds and take bear incident reports…report any damage and interview the campers from the night before. Most of the time the damage was because the camper did not put their food away. One morning a camper flagged me down and said a bear had taken their food. It was the same story and I replied, “You should have put your food away”. He replied, “We were eating it”. It seems they had dinner set up on the table and the bear came into their camp and growled…they jumped up..the bear helped herself to the food they had set out. Here are some photos of some of the damage I recorded and other photos of the bears at “work” . I have chased bears out of the back of vans….then she chased me…that is another story. I remember Helen even chasing a bear out of our cabin with a broom. Kenneth and Keith are in one photo inspecting the cabin damage.

[most of these photos are Ranger Lloyd Smith. The black and whites are from the CLI photo collection.]

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Bug in the Tree

1975 a Volkswagen bug is driven off the road and into the canyon one mile below Rim Village. The car rolled several times and the driver was thrown from the car. The driver, who had been drinking, is unhurt, but the car is a total loss. 

Car Crashes Lloyd Smith 7

A soldier, who was on leave, had just purchased the car and was not yet covered by insurance, Lloyd Smith, the investigating ranger wrote in 2017: “One thing about being a ranger with a camera you get to record some pretty interesting stuff. If I remember this story correctly the young man had just gotten out of the Army and he bought this Volkswagen for $900. He came to Crater Lake and spent the evening drinking on the Rim at the bar. He tried to drive down the curves below the Rim and drove off the road. It rolled several times and he was thrown out of the passenger’s window when it hit the trees. We found him below his vehicle. We hauled him up the slope and took him to the hospital . . . the verdict . . . all ok. . just drunk. We brought him back to HQ and put him to bed to sleep it off. He did not have insurance on the car. The next day my twin brother, Larry, and I went back to investigate it more and to clean up. We found some brick-like objects wrapped in aluminum foil. Our first thought was drugs. Oh, oh. But they turned out to be fruit cake.” 

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Horse Rangers at Crater Lake

Ranger Marion Jack leased the horses to the park. He must have done this for 15-20 years though the 1970s and 80s. The horses were kept at the park during the summer at the corral in Sleepy Hollow. They wintered in the Medford area. We would ride the horses from the barn to the Rim each morning they were on duty on the old CCC Trail behind Headquarters. It was probably one of the best duties in the park to be a mounted ranger.

People would come from all over to pet and to look at the horses. They would ask, “How do I get a job like this”? I truly felt special, I was a lucky guy. Everybody wanted my job. The kids’ eyes would just light up and run over when they saw the horses.

Duke and Larry at the drinking fountain

Lloyd with his son, Keith.

The horses were used mainly on the Rim as PR and to be able to observe the park visitors. The big problem was we had to clean up after the horses. So, in uniform, with a shovel and plastic bag, we would start shoveling. We had a special area near the cafeteria where we stashed the bag and the shovel. The horses were used by the interpretative staff for some great living history programs, like the first explorers to find the lake, as in John Wesley Hillman. The horses were used to patrol the boundary areas during hunting season. The horses also were used for search and rescue.

Lloyd Smith’s ranger vehicle

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1967 – Ranger Boat Sinks

August 29              1967      The Park’s old wooden Ranger boat is sunk near Wizard Island, after using a sledgehammer to knock holes into the boat’s sides and bottom.

October 2010 – Owen Hoffman writes: Larry, That was the old Naturalist’s research boat that was owned by the NPS.  In the summer of 1967, it was deemed unusable and beyond repair.

It was sunk to make room for the OSU Boston Whaler, which had been recently lowered into the lake by sliding it down over banks in  late Spring of 1967, to use the NPS boat house on   Wizard Island for  winter shelter and storage.

The old Naturalist’s research boat was featured in the 1966 edition of “America’s Wonderlands” by National Geographic.  It was photographed in the vicinity of the Phantom Ship with Bruce Black’s wife and daughters on board.

In 1967, our professor of limnology at OSU, Dr. Jack Donaldson, used the OSU Boston Whaler to tow the Naturalist’s research boat from its boathouse out into deeper waters where it was sunk. The boat was sunk by Park Ranger Larry Hakel.  He used a sledge hammer to punch holes through the weakened hull of the boat.  Doug Larson and I went along to watch and help as needed.  Doug took photos.

The boat was last observed peacefully at rest on the lake floor by Mark Buktenica, who was inside the submersible Deep Rover.  This happened sometime in 1988 or 1989.

Letter to the authors from Dr. Doug Larson, October 18, 2010

Here are some photos that I took at Crater Lake in the summer of 1967. That summer, the Park Service decided to get rid of a boat that was stored on Wizard Island. Apparently the boat had been given to the Park Service years earlier to haul tourist around on Crater Lake. According to Dick Brown, Chief Park Naturalist, the boat had been used to smuggle alcoholic beverages from  Cuba to Florida during the Prohibition Era. The boat was intercepted by the Coast Guard, confiscated, and later given to the Park Service.

Because of the unusually dry weather and high fire danger that summer, the Park Service ruled out burning the boat on Wizard Island. Instead, they decided to have it sunk in about 300 meters of water along a transect roughly halfway between Wizard Island and Crater Lake Lodge.

Photo 1 shows the boat parked on the shore of Wizard Island near the entrance of the shed where it had been stored, apparently for many years. Before the boat was towed out to the Lake, we filled the bottom with rocks.

When I (Lloyd Smith) worked on the trail crew at Crater Lake National Park we used the Ranger (Naturalist) Boat for some of our lake duties. From former ranger Owen Hoffman: In the summer of 1967, it was deemed unusable and beyond repair. It was sunk to make room for the OSU Boston Whaler, which had been recently lowered into the lake by sliding it down over snow banks in late Spring of 1967, to use the NPS boat house on Wizard Island for winter shelter and storage. The old Naturalist’s research boat was featured in the 1966 edition of “America’s Wonderlands” by National Geographic. It was photographed in the vicinity of the Phantom Ship with Bruce Black’s wife and daughters on board….cont…

Photos 2  shows us towing the boat toward its final resting place. The towboat is the OSU research vessel, a Boston Whaler powered by two 35 HP outboard motors. Owen Hoffman, grim-faced and wearing the red hardhat and orange sweatshirt, sits in the stern. Jack Donaldson, barely visible and wearing a plaid shirt, far left, operates the research Rod Cranson’s head, inside of the tan-colored hard had, appears in the lower right-hand corner of the photo.

Photo 3 shows the crew preparing the boat for sinking. Note that the engine, a 12 or 16-cylinder job, has been left in the boat to help keep it submerged on the Lake bottom. Four people are shown in this photo. The person nearest the camera and wearing a tan hardhat and olive-green shirt is Naturalist Ted Aurther. Next to him, with his back to the camera and wearing a red hard hat, is a Park Service employee, Larry Hakel. The third person, wearing a red hardhat and orange sweatshirt is Owen Hoffman. The fourth person, whose straw hat is the only thing showing, is Jack Donaldson. Both Hoffman and Donaldson are leaning well into the boat.

Photo 4 shows four or our crew making final preparations for sinking. The person wearing the tan-colored hardhat and blue sweatshirt is Rod Cranson. Own Hoffman, red hardhat and orange sweatshirt, holds the rope tethered to the tourist boat. Jack Donaldson, straw hat and plaid shirt, watches Larry, wearing no hat, preparing to perforate the tourist boat’s hull with a sledgehammer.

Photo 5; Holes appear in the tourist boat’s hull as Larry swings his hammer. Rod Cranson captures this destruction with his camera.  Photos 6,7 and 8 show the boat steadily sinking. I show these last three photos when I give talks about our research at Crater Lake. I say that there are days for limnologists on the lake when everything seems to go wrong. —- Dr. Doug Larson

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