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| The promenade and roadway near the entrance to Rim Village, about 1932. National Park Service photo. |
One of Davidson’s colleagues, Merel Sager, spent much of the 1930 summer season at Crater Lake designing and then overseeing construction of the Sinnott Memorial located just below the promenade. A beaten path had formerly followed a short ridge down to Victor Rock, where visitors regularly gathered some 900 feet above the lakeshore, but the Sinnott Memorial’s construction on that site pointed to the need for a wider and safer route. Sager designed the Victor Rock Trail to start on the promenade just west of Kiser’s Studio and run about 200 feet to the parapet of the Sinnott Memorial. Opened in 1931, the trail was paved like the promenade and walkways nearby, but included two flights of stone steps, tread eight feet wide, and lined on both sides by stone masonry walls.
For projects on longer trails, such as reconstructing the one up Garfield Peak, Sager made adjustments in alignment and grade in consultation with Robertson and Solinsky. Intended to replace the earlier route built by Sparrow’s crew, the NPS intended the realignment to provide a wider tread surface for horses and pedestrians, but also reduce the trail’s average grade to 15 percent. The NPS spent $4,000 that summer on the lower half, building it four feet wide. Sager commented that the trail’s visibility as seen from below had been kept to a minimum by using dry laid rockwork for fill sections and he mentioned introducing stone at irregular intervals on the trail’s outer edge in order to reduce a line that could be both visible and uniform.74
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| Benching on a portion of the Garfield Peak Trail, 1931. National Park Service photo. |
