New Deal Projects, 1933-41
An infusion of project money aimed at building park infrastructure continued to reach Crater Lake during the first eight years of the Roosevelt Administration, fueled by the need to put people to work. Nevertheless, a perception that most of the necessary trails had already been built or reconstructed by that time meant that the park’s inventory of pedestrian routes grew slowly during the last half of the 1930s, with much of the funding for trails going toward maintenance while plans for any new trails usually received low priority for funding. Even so, a few projects for new trails received funding through a job training program called the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and an agency that hired temporary workers known as the Public Works Administration (PWA).
CCC enrollees from a camp at Lost Creek built a trail to the lookout on Mount Scott in 1933. Sager referred to it as a horse trail, one originally intended for packing supplies to the lookout a little more than two miles away. As a National Park Service “standard” trail four feet wide, its maximum grade did not exceed 15 percent.101 This new route superceded the longer trail from Cloudcap, since the road circuit around the lake was realigned to employ a long sinuous curve that got closer to the base of Mount Scott. Once contractors completed grading this section of Rim Drive, visitors could now start about a mile closer to Mount Scott than formerly. The trailhead maintained a weak sense of arrival, however, since the initial section of trail involved a quarter mile of travel over an unpaved track resembling a motorway.
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| Ranger on the Mount Scott Trail, 1933. NPS photo in the National Archives, San Bruno, California. |
Enrollees from the same camp may have worked on reconstructing or improving portions of the old “motor trail” leading to Sun Notch that summer, though records for the project are sketchy. A more ambitious undertaking was proposed for the 1934 season involving construction of a horse trail from a point on the old Rim Road where it crossed Sun Valley, then to Sun Notch, and over to Garfield Peak. The idea for a prospective link to Garfield seemed to come from Superintendent Solinsky, once NPS Director Horace Albright had decided against locating Rim Drive next to the caldera at Sun Notch.102The NPS landscape architects objected to any proposed trail going past Sun Notch, so the effort shifted to building a route that could link Garfield Peak with Vidae Falls. Enrollees started construction of the trail where Vidae Creek crossed the old Rim Road in August 1934, but it only went about a mile toward Garfield Peak by October, and terminated at an overlook located above the falls.103 Another group of enrollees began building a trail from Lost Creek toward Vidae Falls that season, though the project was quietly abandoned after its initial stages. The only other CCC trail project of 1934 consisted of a short trail approximately six tenths of a mile along Lost Creek.104
