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1896
May 5 1896 Climb to Crater Lake: The Mazamas and the Crater Lake Club to Join Hands
The San Francisco Call ? The People of Ashland preparing for a Two – Weeks’ Holiday.
- B. Watson of Ashland, president of the Crater Lake Club, and Rev. E. M. Wilbur of Portland, secretary of the Mazamas, are in the City seeing about Southern Pacific rates for the annual mountain climb of the Mazamas in which the Crater Lake Club will join this year.
Last year Mount Adams was explored to the summit and this year a great expedition to Crater Lake is being organized. Crater Lake lies at the summit of the Cascade Range in Southwestern Oregon, about twenty-five miles north of Mount Klamath. It fills an ancient crater six by seven miles in size, is 2000 feet deep and its surface quietly expands to spend a week at this lake and Joseph Le Conte, John Muir and other California mountaineers have been invited to join the interesting expedition.
- B. Watson, president of the Crater Lake Club, will this evening deliver a lecture at Stanford, having for his subject “Crater Lake.” The lecture will be illustrated, stereopticon plates having been made in this City for the purpose. Mr. Watson is an enthusiast on his subject and declares that neither the Yosemite nor any other park on earth has a thing of greater grandeur than Crater Lake.
Crater Lake Mountain lies some eighty-five miles from Ashland in the Cascade Range. Crater Lake is held in the hollow of the crater, 6000 feet above the level of the sea. The highest point on the bank is 2200 feet higher. The lake is 2200 feet deep, so that the depth of the crater is 4400. The lake has no visible outlet nor inshore is 1000 feet. At one point a rock may be dropped 1000 feet in the water, where it will strike, and bounding, will fall 1200 feet more. There is an island in the lake on the northwestern side that rises 845 feet above the water. The island is itself an extinct volcanic cone. At a point half a mile east of the island the water is 2200 feet deep, making the island rise from the depths of the crater over 3000 feet.
Compared with other craters of extinct volcanoes its altitude, depth and area, it is the greatest known, says Mr. Watson. If Mount Hood were cut off at the height of this crater the cone above that point could be turned into Crater Lake and be lost. According to rules for measuring mountains, taking the incline of the side, etc., this mountain would, were it not burnt off, rise 20,000 feet high.
“There were evidently a number of great explosions in the crater at the time of its activity,” said Mr. Watson. “These released the water of a reservoir, which rushed in and quenched the fire. The rim of the lake is narrow. The view is incomparable; 20,000 square miles lie under the eye, extending over a third of Oregon and across the line of California with Shasta, Pitt, the Three Sisters and many other snow-capped mountains within the great circle.”
For being a self-proclaimed “expert”, Mr. Watson is way off on his mountain measurements!
August 1896 “Late in August, the Mazamas visited Crater Lake and I accompanied them. While in Ashland I received a telegram from the (forest) commission, asking me to return to Portland and accompany them to Crater Lake. I continued with the club until we got to the lake, then, at six o’clock Friday morning I left for Medford, 85 miles distant, walked and arrived in time to catch the North bound five o’clock train Saturday, arriving in Portland Sunday morning, where I conferred with the commission, then we returned to Ashland, where I fitted out and we went to Crater Lake over the Dead Indian road. We spent a night at the lake and returned to Medford by the Rogue River Road. (Steel, 1932)
August 21 1896 The Mazama, an Oregon mountain climbing club, meet in solemn conclave at Crater Lake for the purpose of giving “the mountain that swallowed itself” a name. It had occurred to several members of the club that the destroyed mountain had no name. They proposed the name of their club, which has since been generally accepted. The name comes from a term applied to the Mountain Goat and antelope in Mexico about 300 years ago. The meeting of the executive Council was held in the crater of Wizard Island, at which time it was decided to set aside August 21 of each year as Mazama Day. On that date, 1896, Fay Fuller, the first historian of the society, and the first white woman to climb Mt. Rainier, christened the “Phantom Peak of Yester year” as Mount Mazama by breaking a bottle of crystal water from the bluest lake in the world against a rock on the rim. That night an awesome spectacle was enacted as the crater on Wizard Island was illuminated. Hundreds who watched from the distant Rim, near where Sinnott Overlook now stands, will carry that memory in their hearts forever.
August 22 1896 The Lake’s first water gauge is installed by the Mazamas. A copper pocket is fastened to the upper part of the gauge which contained a record book in which visitors were asked to note the height of the water. The gauge was broken off during the following winter.
August 27 1896 From the Journals of John Muir: Met Sargent and Abbott at Ashland, and we immediately set out for Crater Lake, we three and the driver. The grades were steep and our horse feeble-one spotted roan with the colic and nervous debility, and the other grass-soft and balky-and the spring wagon shackly but tough. Abbott wanted to turn back…but the team driver said it would soon be all right. Ash on the streamside, also alder and oak, the Kellogg and the white oak, with maple, grapevines, clematis, and glossy dark-green smilax climbing thirty feet up the alders. It was soon dark, and we saw the Douglas and yellow pines and the Murray pine in the starlight. Our astonished horses and river ran point-blank against a clean=shafted Pinus ponderosa…When we arrived at Hunt’s we found them gone to bed, but we drove into a cow corral and I built a fire. The wife arose and good-naturedly gave us an eleven o’clock supper. “I’m going to double you fellows up,” said she. Tough!
August 29 1896 From the journals of John Muir: Camped six miles north of Klamath on a pumice plain. Firewood was scarce; Sergent and I made a fire between two young contorta pines. Chat and Jersey mosquitoes.
August 30 1896 John Muir arrives at Crater Lake with the National Forestry Commission, including Gifford Pinchot. Charles Sargent, Director of the Arnold Arboretum; William Brewer of Yale; Arnold Hague of the U.S. Geological Survey; General Henry Abbott of the U.S. Engineer Corps; Alexander Agassiz, marine biologist, member of the U.S. Coast Survey; Gifford Pinchot, practical forester, and Silas Diller. The sky was clouded, but the commission started for Wizard Island anyway.
From John Muir’s journal: The lake walls of thirty to ninety degrees slope descended to the shore, where the slope averages thirty-five degrees…Crater Island is a fine symmetrical volcano and comparatively recent. The sky in the evening was clouded, but we started for the island. Halfway over it began to thunder and whitecaps broke into our overloaded boat. We turned back to the shore at the nearest wooded point, and built a fire to dry our drenched clothing. Pinchot and I went a hundred feet up a ridge and made a fire on a flat rock. Arnold Hague and the boatman and Sargent stayed down on the shore. After the rain, it was too late for the island, so we rowed back to the foot of the trail and climbed up to camp; rather tired but none the worse-rather better for the exercise…Heavy rain during the night. All slept in the tent except for Pinchot.
August 31 1896 John Muir and party leave on a wet and drizzly morning, headed for Grants Pass. Muir writes in his journal: A wet morning, drizzly, large drops from the hemlocks overhead. Mr. Diller put his head in the tent and talked until we got up. Then we went out to the lake. It was still full of mist, the trees gradually vanishing in gloom, producing a weird effect. We had glimpses of the farther shore, the rim laden with glacial detritus. Started off in the cold drizzle…Found fire desolation nearly everywhere…
(The following is reprinted from the John Muir Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 4, Fall 1993)
John Muir Explores Oregon
“It is unreasonable to suppose,” John Muir told the people of Portland, Oregon in 1899, “that (the northwest forest reserves) should be destroyed or imperiled for any local convenience, as a mere present to men engaged in one local industry … they are the property of the nation and for its greatest good”.
Muir’s statement epitomizes his advocacy for the protection of Oregon’s forests and the Cascade Range Forest Reserve established by President Cleveland just 100 years ago. From 1874 to 1908, John Muir studied and explored Oregon’s wonders including the Cascades, Columbia Gorge and Crater Lake but its lush forest inspired him more than anything else. Muir’s published works about Oregon are limited, but a close look at his letters and journals clearly shows a thorough study of the northwest and his extensive contacts with local conservationists.
He first glimpsed Oregon country in 1874 while exploring Mount Shasta. He wrote that form its summit the “snowy volcanic cones of Mounts Pitt (McLoughlin), Jefferson, and the Three Sisters rise in clear relief, like majestic monuments, above the dim dark sea of the northern woods” This view must have compelled Muir to explore these forests and mountains of the great northwest.
In the fall of 1877, he planned to visit Oregon and secured a letter of introduction to Oregon’s pioneer geologist Thomas Condon. But before he left, English botanist Sir Joseph Hooker and Harvard Professor Asa Gray persuaded Muir to change his plans and guide them around the Mount Shasta area. His interest in Oregon remained, and early in 1879 Muir exchanged letters with P.C. Renfrew, an early mountain climber and road builder living outside Eugene. Renfrew urged him to explore the Cascades with him and provided information, at Muir’s request, about the tree species and glacial action around the Three Sisters.
Muir finally came to the Northwest in the summer of 1879. He sailed from San Francisco to Seattle, exploring Puget Sound and the lower Columbia River before sailing to Alaska from Portland. “Rainier and St. Helens are the noblist [sic] mountains I ever saw,” he wrote, “surpassing even Shasta in the beauty of their lines … ” “The one is the pole star – the great white light of the Sound, the other of the lower Columbia” After six months in Alaska, Muir returned to Portland by January 1880. Although intent on exploring the Columbia River, he was immediately “pounced upon” to lecture about his travels in Alaska. The natural Science Association sponsored three “illustrated” lectures entitled “the Glacier of Alaska and California”; “Earth Sculpture: The Formation of Scenery”; and “resources and Gold Fields of Alaska.”
These lectures captivated his audiences. The Oregonian reported that with a “slightly peculiar enunciation” he spoke to standing room only crowds without interruption for up to two hours. His talks were “intellectual and entertaining” and free from the technical and usually unintelligible terms which characterize scientific addresses.” Using sketches and his “wonderful powers of generalization and condensation” Muir’s “whole face lighted up as he talked of the youth of the world, the present morning of creation, (and) the beginning of the work of the infinite … “.
Everyone whom Muir met in Portland is not known, but we do know that he gathered information about Oregon’s forests, mountains and natural history. This information and those he met no doubt aided his future efforts to protect Oregon’s forestlands.
Muir’s most extensive trip to Oregon and the northwest was in the summer of 1888 with William Keith, which took him to Portland, Mount Rainier, Multnomah Falls, and along the Columbia River. This trip allowed further exploration for a series of articles later published in “picturesque California.” His most complete descriptions of Oregon’s diverse landscapes are found in his essay entitled “The Basin of the Columbia River,” published in 1888.
As he traveled north through Oregon, Muir described the country form Ashland to Portland as “one bed of fertile soil … Man and beast will be well fed.” He wanted to climb Mount Hood, but was unable due to illness. Instead he hiked the wooded heights of Portland’s west hills. “Mount Hood is in full view …,” he wrote. “It gives the supreme touch of grandeur to all the main Columbia views, rising at every turn, solitary, majestic, awe inspiring, the ruling spirit of the landscape.
In the 1880’s, Oregonians began a long campaign to reserve the forestlands of the Cascades from acquisition under the nations’ public land laws. The Oregonian noted, during Muir’s Portland visit in 1880, its great concern over the “steady advance made by the wood choppers upon the groves surrounding the city.”
Crater Lake was the first Oregon area to gain protection in 1886. William Gladstone Steel, later to found the Mazamas, a local mountaineering club, led the successful effort to reserve the lake and its surroundings. Muir met Steed during his 1888 visit to the northwest. Later, Muir too called for “a park of moderate extent … ” to protect “Oregon’s abounding forest wealth … “. To those who would do this, Muir wrote, “The trees and their lovers will sing their praises, and generations yet unborn will rise up and call them blessed” Oregon’s Cascades received formal protection by his next visit in 1896. The Bull Run, Cascade and Ashland Forest Reserves were withdrawn in 1892-83 under the 1891 Land Revision Act. The Cascade Reserve was over 4 million acres, and stretched from Mount Hood to Crater Lake.
Early that year, Oregon’s Congressional Delegation made a concerted effort to reduce significantly the size of the Cascade Range Forest Reserve. William Steel and other members of the Mazamas organized a national campaign to protect the Reserve. The Mazamas organized a support for their effort and the Sierra Club responded with a resolution “unalterably” opposing the reduction of “any forest reservation”
In July, Muir left the National Forestry Commission in Washington State and returned to San Francisco before another trip to Alaska. Enroute he met with with [sic] members of the Mazamas in Portland
These meetings no doubt focused on protecting the Cascade Range Forest Commission in Ashland and set out to for the [sic] “remarkable” Crater Lake, the “one grand wonder of the region.” William Steel guided the group. After two days of camping at the lake, the Commission headed down the Rogue River and on to the redwood forests of northern California.
In 1899, Muir stopped again in Portland to join the Alaska Expedition organized by Edward Harriman. At a reception hosted by the Mazamas, Muir discussed with their President Will Steel and former presidents Judge M. C. George and L. L. Hawkins the need to protect the forest reserves from grazing. Steel “promised to do what he could against sheep pasture in the Rainier Park and also in the Cascade Reservation.” Steel kept his word, with a strong condemnation of sheep grazing published later in the Oregonian
Muir’s final trip to Oregon was to Harriman’s Pelican Bay Lodge on Klamath Lake in 1908. Here, Harriman induced Muir to dictate the first part of his autobiography, later published as “The Story of My Boyhood and Youth.” While at Pelican Bay, Muir is believed to have joined a trip led by Will Steel to Crater Lake with Harriman and Governor George Chamberlain, a friend of Teddy Roosevelt. Later Muir joined Harriman on a whistle stop train trip from Ashland to Portland before returning to Martinez. In Salem, the state capitol, Muir and Harriman were taken on a tour of the surrounding countryside by a group of local dignitaries. They included Governor George Chamberlain, the Mayor of Salem and future United States Senator Charles McNary.
While still at Pelican Bay, Muir wrote in his journal, “Happy the man to whom every tree is a friend — who loves them, sympathizes with them in their lives in mountain and plain, … while we, … rejoice with and feel the beauty and strength of their every attitude and gesture, … ” In Oregon, John Muir not only explored “the dim dark sea of the northern woods” but met and worked with many a friend of the trees. Oregon must have made Muir the happiest man on earth.
Summer 1896 The Wilbur Telford family visits Crater. Story by his son – Harry – He was 9 when the family visited Crater Lake. One very memorable experience while we lived in Grants Pass was a trip that my Father took us on to Crater Lake. As I remember that was in 1896. He used the one-horse wagon that he’d used around his shingle mill that he was operating at the time — for hauling the shingle bolts and things to the shingle mill. This old one horse wagon hauled our camp equipment. It was my father and my two older brothers and myself and a neighbor boy on the trip.
Needless to say it was pretty slow going and we were over two weeks to reaching the lake. Most of the time us kids had to walk on account of we being pretty heavy load for the old horse. It was a real interesting trip. As close as we could get to the rim of the lake was about two miles, the road we were on, So we camped about two miles from the lake and then walked the balance of the distance.
One thing that I remember very clearly — they’d been trees fallen across the road and they’d been sawed out by someone that was trying to get up the road and on the ends of these logs people had written rhymes and different things about their experience at the lake. And one of these that I’ve always remembered was:
“Here comes another fool
Who see this awful pool”
.. and I thought that was pretty good.
However we got up to the lake by walking the last two miles and we went down a trail that was pretty rough at that time — to the water’s edge. There were no improvements, no buildings of any kind at the lake at that time. However someone had put an old skiff down this trail to the water and it was leaking quite a bit. But my father was able to fix it up so it would float. And he and my two older brothers made the trip over to Wizard Island and that was always a great frustration for me because if this neighbor boy wouldn’t of been along there would of been room enough for me in the boat. But as it was we had to sit there and wait for them to come back from the island.
They put their names on some paper and deposited them in a fruit jar that was over in the bottom of the crater on Wizard Island. And about thirty years later my older brother was down there in the crater and the jar was still there with the names in it
Summer 1896 J.S. Diller reports finding a broken off tree floating upright in 37 feet of water near Wizard Island. The trunk was broken off just above the water level and the roots at the base could be seen through the clear water on the bottom as if the tree grew where it was standing.
(Eventually named: The Old Man Of the Lake.)
Hillman Peak, first named Maxwell Peak, for an early explorer, renamed Glacier Peak and then finally to Hillman Peak by William Steel.
Jesse Sarvish Barton, age 15, carves his name and the date onto a Mountain Hemlock, located near the present Visitor Center in Rim Village. The kid got into trouble because he used a surveying tool to do the carving and he broke the tool. Barton was in the Park because his dentist father was working on a surveying crew. (Reported by Ranger Wanda Naylor, 1980)
While the Mazamas were camped at Crater Lake, over 200 Klamath Indians were also in camp on the Rim, “since which time they visit the lake without fear.”
Meals are provided at the lower campground at Government Camp, for $1.00 per day, two miles below the Lake Rim.
The U.S. Forest Service founded by an act of Congress
Rep. Tongue introduces into the House, a Crater Lake National Park bill. Much vandalism is discovered around Crater Lake.
September 25 1896 W.W. Nickerson of Klamath Falls, as requested by Steel and Diller, installs a copper bolt 50 feet to the west of the Mazama water gauge at an elevation of 5.75 feet above the level of the water.
Late 1890’s Josephine Schrinscher, teenager, spends night on Wizard Island. Claims to be first white lady to do so. (??)
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