There is some correspondence missing from my files, but the treating crews were obviously finding more infested trees than they had been told were there. Park Superintendent E.C. Solinsky, in a May 1931 preliminary report, said a very serious infestation containing about 3,000 trees had been found in the southwest corner of the park. [26] In a June 8,1931, memo from Keen to Craighead, Keen tried to mollify Craighead’s apprehension, alluded to in a letter of June 2, that the battle of the beetles in Crater Lake National Park was not going well at all. Keen writes several pages of rationale for the poor outcome of control work to date, especially a flare-up of new infestation in an unsuspected area. Keen assumes the full share of blame for not having located these new areas and wonders how big an area should be surveyed to prevent future surprise outbreaks. He finally suggests that all the park and all the adjacent National Forest lands be type mapped and surveyed for new beetle outbreaks, which he said could be accomplished most economically by taking aerial photographs of the area. [27] This aerial photography, if it had been approved would have been a massive pioneering type project and was an indication of Keen’s innovative and technological bent.
Craighead’s rather testy reply [28] arrived a few days later. He stated that he did not agree with Keen’s optimistic outlook of certain infested areas given in an earlier letter to Solinsky. He generally disagreed with many of Keen’s assessments of the situation and called for a meeting in the fall of representatives of the Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Entomology to devise some clear strategies and decide whether further protection is to be continued or the project abandoned. He pointed out to Keen that the Forest Service was only conducting control work in their stands to carry out their obligations to the Park Service. He agreed with Keen that a thorough survey of the park and surrounding forests should be made and doing some of this from the air was appropriate, but he nixed the idea of using aerial photo graphs to produce a type map. He closed the letter with this admonition,
We have failed so miserably on this project that it has reacted very unfavorably on our work in the region. The only alternative I have left is to now insist that you give the preparation of the survey and plan for next year’s control full priority over everything else in your district. I am squarely placing the entire responsibility on you.
Craighead’s strong words were in response to 6 years of optimistic reports from his field entomologists that the battle was nearly won. The trouble was that no one told the beetles. Craighead’s letter also mentions mapping the outbreak from the air. Keen had come from the use of horse and buggy in 1914 to the air age in his fight against forest insects. Keen had actually been working on aerial survey techniques in California for several years, and an aerial survey had been flown over Yellowstone National Park that year according to a July 21, 1931, [29] letter from Craighead to A.E. Demaray of the National Park Service.
Keen’s reply [30] to Craighead on July 17 makes a strong pitch for making a type map of the park and aerial mapping the park infestation even though Craighead did not feel such maps would be accurate enough. Keen promised to do his best even though he was shorthanded. He blamed his inability to forecast the course of the outbreak to the lack of a forest type map of the Park.
On September 2, 1931, Craighead wrote two letters to Keen. In one, [31] he shows pleasure that Keen’s August report (not in my files) describes the beetle situation in the park as improving. He asks, “Do you think it would be possible, if the last remaining epidemic center of infestation can be cleaned up next year, to then put the responsibility of annual survey on the Park Service, as we are doing in other areas prior to appearance of epidemics?” The second letter also sounds like a sigh of relief and commends Frank Solinsky for his good work.
