Archival records relating to most individual trails are generally fragmentary when compared to roads or other types of infrastructure. The relatively small expense of trail construction and maintenance has meant that few contracts (with their inspection reports and other information) were let for such work. As a whole, the documentation on trails at Crater Lake consists of some reporting on construction, but quite a bit less on maintenance or various changes made in the field. Planning documents, photographs, interpretive guides, and interviews can fill some of the gaps in source material. Yet detail about the factors that influenced location, realignments, and maintenance can often be elusive and sometimes vexing.
In acknowledging these limitations of the record, it is still possible to generalize about which trails have received the most attention from park managers over the past century or so. Given the challenging terrain and comparatively heavy use, it is not surprising that trails to the lake have consumed more funding and administrative time than perhaps all the other types of pedestrian routes combined. In descending order, the next group consists of trails leading to popular viewpoints along the rim and those in the main developed area of Rim Village. Other “front country” trails (that is, designed for day use hikes of relatively short duration) located away from the rim, but in proximity to paved roads, are the next in line. Visitation is considerably lighter in the backcountry, where the trail “system” makes extensive use of former fire roads. There are exceptions, however, as realignments completed by the park’s trail crew since 1997 have diverged considerably from the fire roads in some places.
Park Trails Prior to 1916
The period preceding the advent of National Park Service administration at Crater Lake includes some antecedent trails, even if most of them can be characterized as either beaten paths or blazed tracks. Among the beaten paths are those used by tribal members resident in the Klamath Basin to reach Huckleberry Mountain and other destinations west of Crater Lake that required travel through the area that later became the national park.2 Most prominent among these was an east-west route roughly corresponding to a subsequent wagon road built by soldiers from Fort Klamath to the Rogue River in 1865.3 Two of the Indian trails remained prominent enough to be mentioned in field notes for the boundary survey of the newly established Crater Lake National Park in 1903, with one of the routes being a path to Huckleberry Mountain, located in the adjacent national forest.4
