Wayne R. Howe Oral History Interview
Interviewer and Date: Stephen R. Mark, Crater Lake National Park Historian.
Interviewee: Wayne Howe and wife Jean.
Interview Location: At Crater Lake National Park headquarters with wife Jean on September 1, 1988 and subsequent interview at interviewee residence, Roseburg, Oregon.
Transcription: Transcribed by Darci Desharnais Gomoliski, 1993-1994
Biographical Summary (from the interview introduction)
Wayne Howe began his National Park Service career at Crater Lake in 1946 and retired 30 years later as the Associate Regional Director for Operations in Seattle. During that career, he was one of the few people in the NPS to go from a GS-3 fire control aide to a GM-14 even serving as acting regional director for a few months in 1975. He continues to stay active in the Employee and Alumni Association of the NPS and Friends of Crater Lake.
Materials Associated with this interview on file at the Dick Brown library at Crater Lake National Park’s Steel Visitor Center
taped interview (from Crater Lake National Park interview); notes from subsequent interview at his residence in Roseburg, 10128188. Loaned photos for copying and donated other items. File includes considerable correspondence and some news articles. Slide of Wayne Howe and Jean Howe taken during follow up interview.
To the reader:
Wayne Howe began his National Park Service career at Crater Lake in 1946 and retired 30 years later as the Associate Regional Director for Operations in Seattle. During that career, he was one of the few people in the NPS to go from a GS-3 fire control aide to a GM-14 even serving as acting regional director for a few months in 1975. He continues to stay active in the Employee and Alumni Association of the NPS and Friends of Crater Lake.
This interview took place on a warm afternoon at Crater Lake. It was this interviewer’s first on tape, so some editing was necessary. Mr. Howe subsequently loaned the park a number of this photographs and has been very gracious in answering my questions whenever I see him. Copies of those photographs, as well as our correspondence and some field notes, are in the park’s history files.
Stephen R. Mark
(Crater Lake National Park Historian)
February 1994
Part One
Wayne R. Howe’s Background and Life as a Ranger at Crater Lake
Where did you grow up and what is your educational background?
I was born in Ontario, Oregon, which is over in the eastern part of the state. My father was in the laundry business over there. I went through the first grade in Ontario and then my folks decided to move over to this side of the mountains. I’ve always been very thankful that they did, because I would have hated to grow up in Ontario. I just don’t like that part of the country that well although we go back there and I have an Aunt that still lives in Ontario. We came over here to this part of the country in 1927, and first went to what was then call Marshfield, and which is now Coos Bay. Then to Eugene, and then to Roseburg in 1928, and finally settled in Roseburg for good in 1929. I went to grade school and high school. I graduated from high school at Roseburg high school in 1938. We just celebrated our 50th Anniversary about two weeks ago. I then stayed out of school for a year to work to make a little money. Then went on to Oregon State College [now Oregon State University], and got my Bachelor of Science Degree in 1943 in Fish and Game Management. I was in the military at the time that I graduated and we were the only class in history at Oregon State that graduated in uniform. Then I spent three years and several months in the military service. Incidentally, I was married about three days before I graduated from college, down in Roseburg. Jean is a Roseburg girl. She’s with me here today and she will undoubtedly have something to say about this. She had a lot to do with Crater Lake days.
What made you decide to become a Park Ranger?
It was necessity, is what it was. There were a whole lot people that were coming out of World War II that didn’t have a job. When I was released from active duty. I was a First Lieutenant in the field artillery. After coming back from Europe, I was sent to Texas and was down in Texas with both my wife and my oldest son who was then about three of four months old, I guess. We were released from active duty at Fort Sam Houston, Texas and stopped at Carlsbad Cavern and the south rim of Grand Canyon. We would have gone into Bryce Canyon, except it wasn’t opened yet. The winter snows were still hanging there even though it was in the first part of May. The Park Service looked pretty good to me, what I saw of it. But my education was in Fish and Game Management as I say, and so I attempted to get a job with the Fish and Wildlife Service. I was offered a job with the Fish and Wildlife Service, but it was down in the Sacramento Valley and it would have been working with planting rice and this sort of a thing for the game birds down there. We just come out of Texas. There was enough heat in Texas and I knew that the Sacramento Valley was no better. So we decided that there was no way we were going to go down into California, at least on the first go-round. So we kept looking around up here in this part of country. Now I had worked for the Forest Service as a Seasonal for two summers during college. They were desirous of having me back. So I went back to work for the Forest Service for about a month at the Tiller Ranger District, which is just over the mountains from here. We were at the end of the road and it was kind of a primitive situation. But we stayed there only a month. In the meantime, I was getting out letters. I sent out letters to a number of parks. I got a reply from Yellowstone. Yellowstone would have taken me as a Seasonal Ranger. But they had absolutely no quarters for married people, so I threw that out. I had a reply from Olympic and they would have taken me as a Fire Control Aid, but there again there were no quarters. I did have a reply from Crater Lake. At first was there were no quarters. I think I either wrote or called back and said that I wouldn’t come if I didn’t have quarters. Well, it wasn’t too long after that I got a telegram, believe it or not, from Crater Lake offering me a Seasonal Ranger job with quarters for my wife and son, so we packed up an I quit the Forest Service. I liked the Forest Service, it was good organization. I had a lot of friends in the Forest Service, but my education was not in Forestry. At least in those days and it probably holds true somewhat even today, if you don’t have a forestry degree, you’re in trouble.
As far as advancement.
I knew this was the case and I didn’t see any sense in staying with something that I knew that I might just stay the Tiller District for the rest of my life. While it’s nice country, it wasn’t that nice! But anyway, we came up here then. I entered on duty with the Park Service on the 16th of June in 1946. The Park was still closed. I went to Medford and signed up at the office down there. I then came clear around by Klamath Falls and came in the south entrance, which was the only one that was opened. It was still blocked in June of that year because of the snow. I on up here and worked about a week any by this time they had the rest of the Park opened. I went back down and got my wife and son. The quarters that we had for awhile were down in Sleep Hollow. It was one of the very small old houses down in Sleepy Hollow. Our house was to be at Annie Spring. The house has since been demolished, not the log house, but there was another house down there (1). I think it was demolished just this last year. It sat on the canyon. It was built, if not built by the CCC’s, it was used by the CCC’s when the CCC’s Spike Camp was down there (2).
It was last used two years ago and then destroyed last year.
The reason we couldn’t move into that house right away was it hadn’t been used for several years and the pipes were frozen. We couldn’t get water to it. The plumber at that time, Harvey Clift, could not remember exactly where the pipes were. He didn’t know where to dig, was the thing. So we had to wait at least, what was it, a week or two….
Jean Howe: Two weeks.
Before we could move into that place down there. In the meantime, the Chief Ranger had a thought that he would send me out to the north entrance to live in a tent out there. Now the mosquitoes at that time were, and probably still are, pretty thick and pretty big out at the north entrance. I fought against this in a way that I would not expect Seasonal Rangers to fight against the Chief Ranger. Well, I couldn’t see it because I had been promised housing up here and I thought I should have it. I think there was a difference probably in some way in the way returning veterans thought, too. Some of them had been in positions of authority and while as a First Lieutenant, I wasn’t in very much authority, I did have some. And you didn’t take kindly to some of this shifting around, particularly when you had gone through three plus years of War.
I suppose labor had an advantage right after the War too with the expanding job market.
You did. I came on duty as a Seasonal Ranger. I don’t know how we’re doing as far as your list here. After the Chief Ranger decided that was a bad idea, I think he was prodded by his wife, too. Now I don’t mean to say that the Chief Ranger was a bad guy, he wasn’t. He was a very fine Chief Ranger. His name was Carlisle Crouch. He and his wife, Thelma, had a little boy. His wife was great and I’m pretty sure that she said that is no place to send a man and wife and a nine month old baby out to the north entrance. I suspect that had something to do with it. But anyway, we did settle in that house down at Annie Spring and we stayed there for about three years.
Jean: Two years.
My first job here as a Seasonal Ranger was over at the Lost Creek entrance station. The east entrance was open in those days. Some days you might have fifty cars come in there; some days you might have twenty-five. There was a lot of time to read regulations and then read whatever you could get a hold of over there. I would take a pickup from over on this side and travel across to over there and take the cutoff which goes down below over to Lost Creek. It was delightful over there. There wasn’t much to do.
Was the Grayback Road on way even at that time?
No. It was not one way. Everything was two ways.
But you took the modern route to get there?
No. I took the old route.
You went to Vidae Falls and then the scenic way.
You bet ya. That was not much used as far as that’s concerned. The fact is, I don’t think it was closed to the public, but it wasn’t an announced road to take. It was a kind of a nature-type road. If you wanted to go see flowers, or something of this sort, perhaps the naturalists would tell people to go that way. It wasn’t a road that was really told to the general public, but it was certainly a shortcut to get there. You had to go clear up to Kerr Notch and come back down again. Then I spent quite a bit of time at the south entrance at the entrance station. I did a little bit of time on the west entrance too, not much, it was mostly the south and the east. There were two of us here at those times that were trying to get Permanent Ranger status. The other one was a fellow by the name of Duane Fitzgerald. He had graduated from Oregon State in forestry about two years, I think, before I graduated. Two or three years. He lived in the log house which has been demolished long ago down at the Annie Spring junction (3). He had a wife and a small boy. His boy was just about the same age as our boy was. Both he and I were trying to get permanent status here at Crater Lake. So come fall, we were told we would be able to stay for awhile. The old Grazing Service was taken over, as I recall, by the Bureau of Land Management in the fall of 1946. There were two men, and I am sure that they were in Bend at the time, that was looking for jobs. But by nefarious and foul means they discouraged these man by telling them how bad the winters were at Crater Lake, how they lived in isolation, how they could be snowed in at times, how there was no place for children, there was no place for schooling, and this sort of thing. Of course, both of these men turned the appointments down up here. So that left the road open for both Duane Fitzgerald (we called him Dewey and he called himself Dewey) and I. We were both appointed. At that time, it was called a temporary appointment pending the establishment of a register or “taper” appointment. Now we were on that taper appointment clear up until 1949 when a Civil Service exam was given for Park Rangers. There had been no Civil Service exam given for Park Rangers since, I think, 1939. Then of course, the War situation came along. Rangers were going off to war and there were the older ones, or the partially infirm ones, that were still staying in the parks. But there was no examination, so here we were after the War and I don’t know why it took so long for a Civil Service exam to be put together, but it was in 1949 before a Civil Service exam was given. It was early 1950, I think, before we were finally removed from this taper appointment. Now anyone that had a taper appointment was automatically blanketed into the Permanent ranks of the Park Service after they took the examination. But if they failed the examination, well then they had problems. I know of at least one Park Service person, and I’m sure he’s dead now, and I’m sure it was common knowledge. His name was Jack Wade and he was working at Mesa Verde, he failed the examination. I don’t know how he got on the Park Service, but he did. I think his son works for the Park Service now, second generation. But it was, as I say, early 1950 before we actually had permanent solidified appointments. Now we were getting pay and benefits all the same. We got pay raises the same as anybody else did.
Was that different from the other agencies?
I can’t tell you that. I think there were Forest Service exams going on, what they called Junior Forester exams in that time.
BLM too?
I think there must have been since BLM was established , in what, 1946?
But they had a Forester here since ’37 and he stayed until ’57, but I’m not sure if there was much contact.
Well there wasn’t, as far as between the park anyway.
I’ve talked to him in Medford.
Okay, But I imagine that there were examinations and I’m pretty sure there were for the Forest Service, but there wasn’t for the Park Service. There were other examinations. I can recall taking a least one exam for Deputy U.S. Marshall. I was on their register for Deputy U.S. Marshall. Now the main reason for taking these exams was just for practice. I think all of us that were trying to get on with the Park Service were taking all the exams that we could. I’m sure I took more than that, but I don’t recall now.
What were some of your duties?
Well, some of it was just to stay alive with the amount of snow that we had. Now that sounds a little strange because the seasons definitely have changed at least in the last three or four years, as you probably have seen. There hasn’t been much snow in the Cascades in that time. But we had a lot of snow in those years. Now there was one year, and I think it was probably the second year we were here, where you could, no, it was later than that, where we drove completely around the Rim at around Thanksgiving time, and that’s very unusual. But I also remember that one year at Halloween it was snowing like mad and we must have had four feet of snow on the ground at that time. So that was the first of November. We had one year here, one January, where it snowed 333 inches in January alone. And that’s a bunch of snow! We saw the sun shine about two hours that month. A lot of our work around here during those years, and every year, was a pretty heavy snow year during the period 1946-1950 when I left. I left before the winter of 1950-51.
Was there much winter visitation, as far as skiers?
Yes. There was. And that was of course quite a bit of our work during the wintertime on weekends. There were several ski clubs. One of them came out of Klamath Falls, and I think there were two of them that came out of Medford. And they would come up here with their ski tows and set them up. Now they set them up like up here on the slopes of Garfield and then go out toward the north entrance not very far out and set up on some of those slopes that would be right alongside the road out there.
I haven’t noticed those yet. I’ve seen the one up here, just up the road.
There was one there, and there was one clear up at the Rim which is just below where the concessionaire’s building is now. The one that’s back in the trees, you know, south of the Lodge there. There was a ski tow in through there. They came up every weekend. Then about the second year we were here, I think it was the winter of ’47-’48, there was a commercial ski tow operation started in here and that’s the one that was on the hill behind, well, I’d say almost directly south, from the community house back there. There used to be a campground and stuff in there, and a pretty good slope. Now one of the problems that they had one winter was that the people would come up on a Friday and dig the rope out and invariably Friday night, it would start to snow. We perhaps would have beautiful weather all week and Friday it would start to snow, soon as they had the rope dug out. And so, by Saturday morning when they wanted to open up, the rope was under a couple of feet of snow. And I don’t say that lightly because it very easily snowed two feet over night. It was not uncommon around here, and let’s hopes that it does it again. It was like they were riding a streak of bad luck, that’s all, because it would seem to be always that way. They would get the thing all ready and then it would snow on them. And it would be late Saturday afternoon before they would get dug out again, still snowing. And by Sunday they would be ready to go and probably the storm would be bad enough so people wouldn’t come. So they did not make a go of it. That’s all there was to it. The ski clubs kept coming. Our own group of employees got together and we put money together and we bought, I don’t quite remember now who we bought if from, we bought a ski tow, the motor, and the rope and we sit it up in several places around here and used it ourselves for our own ski club. I don’t remember now what we called our ski club, but we had a name for it. And we had a lot of fun on it. We learned to ski around here, both my wife and I, on 7-foot 6-inch skis which were the skis the skis that the Army used during World War II. Now, no one in his right mind, as you can see. I’m not that tall; I’m about 5-10, and no one anymore would possibly think of doing anything like that except perhaps for cross country skiing. But we learned our downhill skiing that way. We switched within a year or so to shorter skis. My wife was skiing one time and we have a little argument about where it was. She thinks it was somewhere around the Superintendent’s house, and I think it was up at the Rim. We had a January where it didn’t snow for almost a month. We put the ski tow in with a snow cat and there were tracks where the snow cat had cut grooves into the snow and she came off of that ski tow and got in one of the grooves and couldn’t turn and she fell and twisted her knee and that put a stop to her skiing from then on, that and subsequent pregnancies. To get back to what we did in the wintertime. Of course, in those days and perhaps it’s still that way, the visitation dropped off at Crater Lake right after Labor Day. You could virtually take cannon up to the Rim and shoot it right down from where the concessions are now clear down to the Lodge and you wouldn’t have hit anybody. There just was no one here. The concession closed down right around the 10thto the 15th of September. And there were beautiful, golden Indian summer days. It was a glorious time to be at Crater Lake. But there weren’t many people here. However, we did keep the entrance station open. We closed the entrance station at the north sometime around the middle of September. Sometimes we closed it by the first snowstorm which usually came about the Fall Equinox. Sometimes we had to close it because of lack of personnel. There were only two or three of us here to take care of it. But we did keep the one at Annie Spring open. We moved up from the south and the west. I should mention that, in those days, we had an entrance station at the south entrance and at the west entrance and at the north entrance, clear out at the entrances.
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.
Were there any kinds of medical facilities?
After the War, we had no medical facilities here.
Even though the Hospital was built as such…
But it was never used as such. The Hospital Building which you alluded to right there was one of the nice places in the Park to live in at that time. Because it was the first place that was built so that you had living quarters out of the snow.
Still is.
Still is, sure. So that was a nice place. But it wasn’t really finished until sometime during the period of time that we were here.
Jean: It wasn’t even used in the wintertime when we were here, was it?
No, I don’t think so.
Jean: Summer quarters?
Just summer quarters for, I think, the Chief Clerk which was what your Administrative Officer was called in those days. I think he and his wife and a small daughter lived there. His name was Daryll Crumley.
So the Sleepy Hollow quarters were not used in the winter?
Oh yes, the Sleepy Hollow quarters, you bet. At that time, we were figuring it out on the way up here, I think we had about ten or twenty permanent people that stayed up here in the Park. Now I say permanent, but they weren’t all permanent. Some of them were what we call now…I can’t remember what we would call them when I retired, but they were probably on a nine-month appointment. They were awful close to permanent. They returned year after year.
Jean: There were six or eight of those houses at Sleepy Hollow used all year.
They were cramped and some of them had real long snow tunnels. Now, I know I’m jumping around a lot here, Steve. I hope that it’s not fouling up your procedure at all. But snow tunnels are one thing, of course, that had to go up every fall and had to come down every spring. That was not a Ranger job. I don’t mean that we were too good to be that. They had a crew and they came in with a cherry picker and put them down. They were built somewhere else and they were brought in. The Administration Building here had a huge snow tunnel that went from the curb clear back in. And all the houses had the same thing. The three small houses the first row up, had snow tunnels and they were about, oh I guess, ten feet long.
Different from now?
Oh, yes.
Jean: Not ten feet, at least fifteen feet.
They were long, dark snow tunnels. Some of the snow tunnels at Sleepy Hollow I think must have been thirty feet long the way they had to be put in order that you could plow in front of those snow tunnels. Sometimes those snow tunnels had to be dug off and shoveled off too, because they weren’t the stoutest things in the world, although they were fairly good snow tunnels.
That one at the Administration Building was different from the A-frame that was up until a couple of years ago?
Oh yes, you bet. It was much narrower than that, it probably wasn’t wider. I’m sure you could have stood in it and held your arms out and you would have touched the sides of the snow tunnel. It was strictly a way to get thought.
Jean: I think we have a picture of that.
We probably do. Maybe we can get you that.
Most of the pictures we have, the buildings too deep under the snow to make out that particular snow tunnel.
One thing we had to do all the time was shovel out our comfort station at the rim. That had to be shoveled out. There was a snow tunnel to each entrance, both the men and the women’s side at the rim comfort station. But we had to shovel out to get to that, because the plow would come along the curve and the plow would always put snow into the snow tunnel; it never failed.
Jean: Snow drifted into the snow tunnel, too.
So badly. There would be times when the snow tunnels, like at the houses or at the rim would be piled clear up to the top of the snow tunnel and you’d have to crawl over the thing and start throwing snow back out again. I know at least one time, and I think it was after we left, that one of the equipment operators lived at Sleepy Hollow. His little boy was coming into the snow tunnel and he met a bear coming out. We don’t know what happened except that we know that the boy wasn’t hurt, but probably shocked. But that goes into another thing about the wildlife. But, we also, in shoveling had to keep a path up to the rim so you could go up and be able to see the prime thing we have here—the lake. We had a rope that we put along the rim. We planted it on snow poles. It probably extended a hundred yards each way from where the present location is and where that tin snow tunnel is a present time. We had signs on it to keep people from going beyond that rope. We shoveled steps up there. Now, of course, if you got a melting situation then you had to do this probably twice a day anyway. This was a job that we did every day as long as the road to the Rim was opened. In those days, virtually all the time we kept the road to the rim opened.
Was the cafeteria opened during the winter?
No, the cafeteria was not opened but there was a lunch counter in- what’s the name of that building, the one that’s used as kind of an Interpretive Center?
The Community House.
In the Community House [Rim Center] there was a lunch counter in there and I think, in the last year or so, it was kept open pretty much all the time as long as the weather was halfway decent; it was run by the wife of one of the equipment operators, Lee Fulton. She ran that quite a bit.
So it wasn’t a concession operation?
No, it wasn’t a concession operation. But it was probably a special use permit that the Park Service granted to her to run that up there at that time.
A bit like some Forest Service kinds of operations.
Yes, and incidentally the Fultons, I think, are still around here. I don’t know whether they are still around or not. They were here for a long, long time. I think John and Lee’s son works here now (4).
John Fulton was here. In fact, I have his post office box. He’s moved on, but he moved, I think, about two months before I got here.
Where did he go, do you know?
Maureen [Briggs] would know.
Anyway, it was Lee that operated that. But before that time, on the weekends, I think there was a sub-concession from the concessionary. It was part of the concession at that time. They would go up and open on Saturday and Sunday for the skiing crowd that came in. We did have it pretty good when the weather allowed it. It wasn’t Lodge concession that ran the ski tow, it was another concessionary- like the special use permit. When it was running, there were quite a few people who came up here on the weekends, because we were busy on the weekends. We had numerous accidents. Most of them were fender benders, as I can recall; we never had anything that was real serous.
None of the tragic accidents…people falling. We have pictures of cars in canyons.
I can’t recall any real serious ones in the wintertime because people were going fairly slowly. The worst part of it is everybody, because of the high snow banks, would have a tendency to go away from the high snow banks and pull toward the center of the road. It was a very stupid thing to do because the snow banks couldn’t hurt you too much. Now the might scratch your car, but people would do this. Now those of us who knew hoe to drive here we would drive close to the snow banks because that was the safe place to be. But this was where a lot of things happened. People go minor injuries and this sort of thing. We had a First Aid hut up at the rim. We took care of a lot of ski injuries up there. It was just a little portable shed, it was one room, and had a little oil stove in it with room enough for a cot.
All wood frames?
All wood frames.
Square?
Square. I do have a picture of that in case you don’t, with a couple of the seasonal rangers standing in front of it. That was our headquarters for our ranger force up at the Rim in the wintertime. That’s where we stayed. We were trained in First Aid, of course. We would bring ski injuries across the slopes and we’d taken them, if they happened somewhere where we could get them to the ski tow, we’d take them up the ski tow and then cross country and then bring them down over to that ski hut and take care of them. We had some fairly severe ski injuries that we did care of. We had several fractures. Of course, we had no way of setting them, but we would splint them. We had no ambulance or anything. They would have to furnish their own transportation. Now if someone had come up here and they couldn’t get back by themselves, why the Ranger Force would take care of them. We had some park station wagons that we could use for transportation. But there were no medical facilities up here. The closest medical facilities were Medford, or I think there was First Aid at Prospect. The Bureau of Indian Affairs did have a doctor at Fort Klamath. The fact is, and I remember one time, I might as well digress on it as it was during the wintertime, one of our equipment operators was going to town. A snow plow had been plowing the road and only one lane was plowed. You have a tendency, because there are very few people up here at the time when you were going one way or the other, you would take the plowed section. Now a lot of the times it was loose snow and you could get over fairly easy. Now the snow might fly up all around you and your couldn’t see anything. But you were safe doing this. Well this equipment operator and his wife were going south and the snow plow was going north and they collided. Now it was not a very serious accident but the steering wheel snapped and it was a Studebaker, I say an old Studebaker, it probably was not an old Studebaker then. The steering wheel snapped and a corner of the steering wheel caught him right in the carotid artery. Now it so happened that the other permanent ranger, Dewey Fitzgerald, was down there and I don’t know why, whether he was right behind with his pickup but he grabbed him by the neck and by pressure and I don’t recall all the circumstances but he either drove him down himself to the Doctor at Fort Klamath, the Indian Service doctor at Fort Klamath holding that artery or someone else helped him. I am not at all clear on this. It has escaped my memory. I just remember that it happened. The doctor at Fort Klamath said, if you had not done this you would have lost him.
We’ve mentioned the winter duties. Like I said before, it sounds like we didn’t have much to do. But you also have to remember that the period of time from 1946, ’47 and ’48, there were only three rangers here most of the time. That was the Chief Ranger and two acting Assistant Chief Rangers. There were only three of us: Clyde Gilbert, Dewey Fitzgerald, and myself. One of us was off duty a good deal of the time, so the things that were done, you did it. You did them, just you. You had to patrol the roads. We made sure that somebody went out on the roads every day when it wasn’t snowing hard, which in those years seemed like it wasn’t very often. We had telephone boxes out along the roads in those days, too. I don’t know it you knew about that part.
No, I didn’t.
We had, and I don’t recall how many, but there must have been al least three telephone boxes out the west road and at least three or four on the south road. These were emergency telephone boxes. We had to keep those dug out all the time and checked. We didn’t have to repair the lines, although the ranger force assisted in repairing those lines when they went down and they did go down a good deal of the time. It seemed like when you wanted those telephone boxes they weren’t in operation. I don’t know what year those telephone boxes went out, probably very shortly after the ‘40’s, because radio came in and I’m sure that once we had car radios the telephones went out.
Another gap in our records.
I suppose it might be considered a minor thing, I just happened to think about it. But they did serve their purpose, and several times it was very valuable to have those telephones in. That was another winter project; we had to keep those boxes shoveled out so that you could get into them if you had to use them. As I said, we shoveled up at the rim virtually every day. Now, it wasn’t always that way. But we had to got up and check it to make sure, because even if it wasn’t snowing there was enough loose snow around that comfort station entrances could be drifted shut and the path [to view the lake] up to the Rim could have been drifted shut. We had to continually chop stairs or cut stairs in so people could get out. Now it was not an easy way to get up to see the lake. You had to want to see the lake in order to do it. But that was part of our duties. There were reports to be written. I can’t recall now much about the reports except the Chief Ranger’s monthly report, but those had to be made all the time on what was to be said. We did have to make two or three snow surveys each month. We made a snow survey, one of them was down by Anni Spring. Probably the snow course is still there. I imagine it is. I don’t know. The Soil Conservation Service, of course, set up these snow courses, but the park rangers did the work. We always took the snow course. The Soil Conservation did not do the snow courses. One of the men who were prominent in the Soil Conservation Service at Medford, I believe at the time, his name was Jack Frost ironically enough. I’m not kidding.
He worked here in the ‘30s. (5)
That’s right.
I had an interview with him last year.
Good. Well, that was what I was going to say. He had been a ranger here so he knew his way around and undoubtedly helped lay out the snow courses. We had one that was somewhere up here around headquarters. I do not recall where it was. It could have been down on Munson Creek, somewhere over here. We took snow courses down at the east entrance once a month. We either skied or we took a Tucker Snow Cat, which is one of the first Snow Cats that Tucker made. Perhaps I better explain myself in case you don’t know. Tucker Snow Cat Company was located in Medford. I don’t know if it is still there or not.
Howard Arant mentioned them as well and there was this problem with Solinsky. That’s as much as I know.
The first Tucker Snow Cats had skis on the front and wheels on the front so you could raise the skis and put the wheels down so you could go on the road. And in the back it had two tracks, rubber-type tracks on the back and then when you got on the snow bank, why you would get the wheels up and go with skis in front. Now it worked fairly well except if you got too close to a tree why it would invariably get stuck because one track would go down. You haven’t been here in the winter yet, but in a good heavy snow there will be a big dip around the tree. The tree will hold out the snow and there will be a big hole around the tree. If you got too close to that tree, you would invariably get stuck. Or your skis would dig in or you would throw a track.
The well that’s around a tree.
That’s it, yeah. So you had to be very careful that you didn’t get too close to them. On a Snow Cat trip, you usually could figure that you had to put the track or tracks on at least once in a fifteen mile trip. It was a pleasure, but it was not a pleasure. Sometimes it could be a lot of work. I can remember one time during the winter, the power had gone out. It was the day before New Year’s. On that day the power company people came up here. The power line was down. You showed a picture of where the power line goes across Annie Creek canyon. The power line was down somewhere down there. I can recall that I took two of these people down that way and it had been snowing and was snowing and there was a lot of deep snow and loose snow. The Snow Cat didn’t work that well in loose snow, either. So we went down to the power line. I think we threw a track maybe two or three times on the way down there. Finally, we go almost down to the canyon and threw it so badly that there was no way that I could get it back. So there were two possibilities. One of them was to stay down there and stay the night and go out the next morning. If I had been by myself that’s exactly what I would have done. We had sleeping bags and all this sort of thing with us and it would have been no problem. The snow would have just filled over the Snow Cat and you could have stayed right underneath it and been very comfortable. Now, these two gentlemen didn’t want to, and they seemed to me at that time like they were old. Now I was in my twenties in those days and they probably in their thirties, so they were old. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. So we hiked all the way back in. I gave one of them my skis, and I think there were two pair of snow shoes and I took one pair of snow shoes and the other one took the other one. We hiked back in. I think it was probably around five miles that we hiked back in. I don’t recall exactly. We got in and I can recall that the Fitzeralds and the Howes were getting together for New Year’s Eve for some very mild entertainment. But I didn’t make it in time. I got home, I think, about a quarter after twelve. My wife was sound asleep in bed. It wasn’t much of a New Year’s Eve as far as I was concerned. But that’s just one of the things that happened with the Snow Cat. We also took the Snow Cat over to the east entrance. Sometimes, if there were several people, all would be towed on the skis behind it. It didn’t take too long to get over there if you went when the conditions were right. The snow lots of times were loose and light. The Snow Cat would sink down into it and you would have troubles with it, it just didn’t work that well. But if you had maybe three or four inches of snow over harder surface it went fine except on side hills. We’d have had to cut tracks along side hills. We went the old way, we didn’t go up around the Rim. To get to Lost Creek we went along the Grayback Ridge. At one place over there, where you look right down into Sun Creek, it’s pretty steep there when the snow builds up. It gets on an angle, of maybe 30 degrees or possibly even 35 and 40, and to go around that you then go way up in the trees above it or you had to cut a path across for your upper track. Sometimes that got a little bit sticky. But you could get across that way. When we went to the east entrance we would always take the Snow Cat. We would sometimes stay over there. I think I can recall staying in the old house that was there at that time, at least once. Sometimes we had to shovel snow off of the roofs over there because they were not in very good condition. Anyway, neither the entrance station nor the ranger station which is long gone from over there, were in good shape. We measured the snow down at the east entrance. Usually during that period of time, when we were over there we would go on up the Rim. We have some pictures, some slides taken of the lake frozen over at that time in 1949. We have some pictures taken from Kerr Notch. It was not uncommon to take the Snow Cat out to be looking around the in woods during the winter just to see what conditions were like. I noticed that you asked were there forest disease problems. We were having the start of bark beetle at that time.
The well that’s around a tree.
That’s it, yeah. So you had to be very careful that you didn’t get too close to them. On a Snow Cat trip, you usually could figure that you had to put the track or tracks on at least once in a fifteen mile trip. It was a pleasure, but it was not a pleasure. Sometimes it could be a lot of work. I can remember one time during the winter, the power had gone out. It was the day before New Year’s. On that day the power company people came up here. The power line was down. You showed a picture of where the power line goes across Annie Creek canyon. The power line was down somewhere down there. I can recall that I took two of these people down that way and it had been snowing and was snowing and there was a lot of deep snow and loose snow. The Snow Cat didn’t work that well in loose snow, either. So we went down to the power line. I think we threw a track maybe two or three times on the way down there. Finally, we go almost down to the canyon and threw it so badly that there was no way that I could get it back. So there were two possibilities. One of them was to stay down there and stay the night and go out the next morning. If I had been by myself that’s exactly what I would have done. We had sleeping bags and all this sort of thing with us and it would have been no problem. The snow would have just filled over the Snow Cat and you could have stayed right underneath it and been very comfortable. Now, these two gentlemen didn’t want to, and they seemed to me at that time like they were old. Now I was in my twenties in those days and they probably in their thirties, so they were old. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. So we hiked all the way back in. I gave one of them my skis, and I think there were two pair of snow shoes and I took one pair of snow shoes and the other one took the other one. We hiked back in. I think it was probably around five miles that we hiked back in. I don’t recall exactly. We got in and I can recall that the Fitzeralds and the Howes were getting together for New Year’s Eve for some very mild entertainment. But I didn’t make it in time. I got home, I think, about a quarter after twelve. My wife was sound asleep in bed. It wasn’t much of a New Year’s Eve as far as I was concerned. But that’s just one of the things that happened with the Snow Cat. We also took the Snow Cat over to the east entrance. Sometimes, if there were several people, all would be towed on the skis behind it. It didn’t take too long to get over there if you went when the conditions were right. The snow lots of times were loose and light. The Snow Cat would sink down into it and you would have troubles with it, it just didn’t work that well. But if you had maybe three or four inches of snow over harder surface it went fine except on side hills. We’d have had to cut tracks along side hills. We went the old way, we didn’t go up around the Rim. To get to Lost Creek we went along the Grayback Ridge. At one place over there, where you look right down into Sun Creek, it’s pretty steep there when the snow builds up. It gets on an angle, of maybe 30 degrees or possibly even 35 and 40, and to go around that you then go way up in the trees above it or you had to cut a path across for your upper track. Sometimes that got a little bit sticky. But you could get across that way. When we went to the east entrance we would always take the Snow Cat. We would sometimes stay over there. I think I can recall staying in the old house that was there at that time, at least once. Sometimes we had to shovel snow off of the roofs over there because they were not in very good condition. Anyway, neither the entrance station nor the ranger station which is long gone from over there, were in good shape. We measured the snow down at the east entrance. Usually during that period of time, when we were over there we would go on up the Rim. We have some pictures, some slides taken of the lake frozen over at that time in 1949. We have some pictures taken from Kerr Notch. It was not uncommon to take the Snow Cat out to be looking around the in woods during the winter just to see what conditions were like. I noticed that you asked were there forest disease problems. We were having the start of bark beetle at that time.
Did there seem to be certain cycles of bark beetle?
Yes, very definitely. Those were the days when the Park Service thought that they had to take immediate steps to prevent or to eradicate bark beetle. The Park Service spent, I would suspect, literally millions of dollars or at least a million dollars to take care of bark beetle and blister rust and this sort of thing. Blister rust, of course, came in from Canada. So it’s not a natural situation. But we spent an awful lot of money trying to eradicate blister rust clear down into Sequoia/ Kings where blister rust has never been found I don’t think, as far as I know.
That’s the Ribes?
That’s right. Later on when I was Assistant Chief at Sequoia. I was in charge of the blister rust program. We used about forty or fifty people. We used them for fire crews, they were great fire crews. They were in fantastic condition from hiking up and down hills. That was the best thing that they were for. The bark beetle was starting to come into Crater Lake at that time. Now within a very few years they had quite a program, because a man by the name of Verne Bertsch came on here. His first ranger job was here. He later worked for me at Sequoia. He died in office back in Washington, D.C. of a heart attack. But he was in charge of the bark beetle control project. He did a lot of it over on the east side of the park. He did a lot of cutting over there, cutting and burning is what they would do.
Our most recent fire (6) has burned up a lot of beetle kill. I don’t know if this latest round of beetle kill has come in from the north.
I think it probably is. It so happens that just a few days before we were up here for the dedication (7), we came back from Wallowa Lake and came down from Bend and were quite astounded at how much more bark beetle kill there has been in there since the last time we were up in that country. So that’s a recent one, but of course which been going on for several years. In my time here it was building up, but didn’t really get to a real crescendo until in the early ‘50’s — probably ’51, ’52, ’53, somewhere along in there is when they were really working on it here. They had some fairly good size crews that did work on it. Wildlife problems. We had no deer problems in those days that we knew of. As a graduate wildlife biologist, I think I would have noticed if we had deer problems. There were deer around, of course. We would see them. We had some elk. Occasionally, we would see an elk. I think the first elk I saw was crossing the road down along the south road somewhere. I was amazed to see an elk cross the road. But bears, now that’s a different story. That’s a big story. In those days, we had a feeding ground. It was between here and, oh probably a mile and a half on the road to the south and then off to the east. It was a garbage dump is what it was (8). Of course, the bears congregated in there. As I recall, again it wasn’t advertised, but practically every Park Service individual took people in to see the bears. So it was well known, and I’m sure every concession employee knew where the garbage dump was. I’m sure this is the case. We did have bear problems. We had bears that tore into cabins up at the rim. We had bears that tried to get into house right down here. My son was about two years old down at Annie Spring and Jean looked out one time and he was chasing a bear. He was not gaining on the bear, the bear was rapidly going away from him. He was saying, “Nice doggie, nice doggie”. Of course, here was kid that was being raised in the Park Service and we couldn’t have pets in those day. So he didn’t know what dogs were all about. That bear was a dog as far as he was concerned.
Jean: Our house at Annie Springs had claw marks in the kitchen where a bear had come in that house before we lived in it.
In those days there was a campground which was behind the old log house which would be on the west side of the present road. It was one of our main campgrounds, the Annie Springs campground. And I can remember one time when I very foolishly hit a bear on the nose with a clipboard to get him scared off. Now I would never do that again. It was a stupid thing to do. For some reason or another, I did hit the bear on the nose with a clipboard. That’s about the closest I ever came to a bear incident of my own.
Jean: We had a hard time sleeping at Annie Spring because the people in the campground would get out and beat on the dish pans in the middle of the night to scare the bears away. We were right next to the campground.
We really did have quite a serous problem here with bears. You’ve asked later on about some of the changes in the Park Service. One of the best changes was getting the garbage dumps out of the parks, one of the fantastic things that happened. It was far from being natural and of course it drew bears into the park. Now do you have bear problems at all anymore?
To give you some background, I’ve been here one season and I haven’t seen a bear in the Park yet. And I do spend some time in the backcountry. When I worked in Sky Lakes one summer as part of a trail crew, I saw one bear, but just the hind end and it was going away. It was later summer and the huckleberries were out. That shows you the difference.
I don’t feel that they’re not here anymore; they’re just wild animals now, which is the way they should be.
And they’re as difficult to see as some wild animals.
I know. But here again, I digress again a little bit, but when I went to Olympic they had a lot of bear damage up there on trees. And there was open season on bears a good deal of the year. I rode the trails a lot in Olympic and I don’t think I saw more than three bears all the time that I was in Olympic National Park. Now we did see one time at our house and because we had the remains of steelhead in the garbage can and he came up and tried to rip that off. So at a place like that you know that there are bears there. So I’m convinced that there are still bears in Crater Lake.
We see tracks fairly often.
Now I trust you are interested in bear stories, but human aspect.
Well, somewhat.
Well, you’re going to get them.
I knew that.
Well, I think my most famous one, and this happened after a good chief ranger came here, Lou Hallock, and an Assistant Chief Ranger by the name of Lee Sneddon. It was in the spring of 1950, when the bears were just coming out the snow banks had dropped enough so they could easily get up on the snow banks. It was right in this area, close to where the service station is, a mother bear and two cubs were beginning to give us problems (9). We had at that time in the ranger force arsenal a small four-ten shot pistol, with a barrel about, I suppose, twelve to fourteen inches long. It was hand held. We used it to just harass bears, it what we did. And that’s all it did. It would just sting them at a distance of 75-100 feet. I don’t think it could do anymore than that. This one bear and two cubs, as I say, were staring to give us trouble. I went down the road and this cub went up at tree out here. It seemed to me like it was 75-feet up in the tree. It probably wasn’t that high, but it was a good 50-feet. It went out on a branch. So I pulled down on that bear with that four-ten shot pistol and let fly. The bear let loose of that limb and dropped to the snow below and it was just as dead as it could be. Dead. That’s all there was to it. Now the only thing I could figure out later on was that the shot had balled up and it was probably an old shot shell just acted as a bullet. I didn’t see where it went in; I didn’t see where it came out. Well, here I was with a dead bear on my hands. Now the superintendent at that time was Ernest P. Leavitt. Now Ernest P. Leavitt didn’t take kindly to anybody shooting his bears. The fact is he took great dislike if his bears were disturbed.
He liked bears.
He liked bears. He didn’t care what they did to anything else. He liked his bears. I think Lou Hallock was very sympathetic to doing away with bears when they gave you troubles. But, anyway Lee and I got together. We left that bear down there at the time. We didn’t want any more people to know about it than could help because the fewer people that knew about it, the better off we were. So that night, we went down there after it was dark and we loaded that cub bear in the back of my pickup or his, I don’t remember which. And we took it down to just the other side of our house, or to one of the viewpoints down Annie Creek canyon. We hauled the cub bear out of the back of the pickup and one of us got on the head and one on the heels. We swung that bear and swung that bear and threw it in the canyon. Well, the only problem was that when we looked down, it didn’t sound like it went down. So we shined our flashlight down there and it didn’t. It lodged about thirty or forty feet down. We knew we had to do something about that. So we had to get ropes and let ourselves down and get rid of that bear again. This is a rather famous bear story, between Lee and I, and our relatives. This is the first time it’s been taped.
Jean: He had to wait until he retired.
Nobody can do anything now. Lee’s retired, Leavitt’s dead, and Lou’s retired so it doesn’t make any difference. Now, we had other cases too. I remember the Chief Ranger’s house up here, which is the one that’s unoccupied (10). The one we went through the other day. Lou Hallock was in that. One wintertime, there must have been four or five feet of snow on the ground. This bear was out too late, no question about that. He tried to break in his door. Lou took his rifle and went out and he shot that bear. And of course, it’s perfectly legitimate to get rid of a bear like that, because it very definitely was trying to break in. It was probably a sick bear and didn’t have enough food to hibernate.
