National Park Service Trail Building, 1917-21
If trail construction had to largely depend on annual appropriations made individually to Crater Lake and other national parks in the years before creation of the National Park Service, then it is hardly surprising that so little beyond a dangerous path to the lake could be used by visitors over the first 15 seasons since the park’s establishment. Only once during Arant’s tenure had yearly appropriations for managing and developing Crater Lake exceeded $3,000. Congress became more magnanimous while Steel served as superintendent, with appropriations reaching $8,000 per year for the period of 1913 through 1916. By contrast, the newly appointed NPS superintendent Alex Sparrow received $15,000 to administer the park in 1917.28 That figure allowed Sparrow latitude in pursuing projects that neither of his predecessors enjoyed, with a comparatively large amount of trail construction completed during the summers of 1917, 1918, and 1919.
Sparrow’s training as an engineer led him to Crater Lake in 1913, having been part of the Army Corps contingent assigned to build the park’s road and trail system for the following three seasons.29Although the Corps of Engineers brought only one trail into existence during their stay in the park, Sparrow in his new role as superintendent could fund construction of several new routes intended for hikers and equestrians. NPS crews built three trails in 1917, one of them accessing Garfield Peak from the Crater Lake Lodge in Rim Village. Relatively steep at only 1.25 miles in length (as opposed to 1.7 miles after realignment in 1931), the route had an average width of four feet and cost $960. The new trail also included examples of benching (used to maintain a uniform grade with rock in fill sections), dry laid retaining walls, and sheeting—which avoids cross drainage devices like culverts or water bars by building the trail so that water is shed uniformly across it. Another trail connected the Watchman with Rim Village, a distance of four miles for a mere $460. Generally aligned so that it followed a route closer to the caldera’s edge than the Rim Road, it ascended the south and east sides of Watchman.30
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| Newly-built section of the Garfield Peak Trail, October 1917. Photo by Alex Sparrow, author’s files. |
With an appropriation available, Sparrow also had the trail to Crater Lake reconstructed. This amounted to acting on a recommendation made by Daniels three years earlier, though fortunately the funding exceeded Daniels’ original estimate of $1,000.31 The NPS aligned it in order to avoid a wet area below Rim Village where running water led to washouts and continual maintenance. A NPS construction crew lengthened the trail to roughly 1.25 miles, lessening the grade by extending switchbacks below the lodge. Built at a cost of $4,462, it provided visitors with a way of participating in boating and fishing, but also allowed for the use of horses and burros when the trail bearing Sparrow’s name opened in 1918.32
