Other improvement projects were limited to the trail crew’s involvement, though in one instance, their efforts represented mitigation for a larger project. Cultural cyclic maintenance funds paid for repairing the Watchman Trail, which required some work once project activities aimed at restoring the lookout structure halted in 2000. That funding source also paid for replacing creosote-treated timbers at several observation points on the Garfield Peak Trail in 2007. During this undertaking the trail crew substituted stone masonry for the timbers as safety barriers while also replacing some benches partially built from materials treated with creosote. They restored some damaged dry-laid retaining walls on the trail that dated from 1931 and addressed an increased number of social paths that had developed along the route.214
Over the following summers, the trail crew again utilized cultural cyclic maintenance funding to address the deteriorating condition of the Castle Crest Wildflower Garden loop and connecting trail from Park Headquarters. Little work apart from annual clearing had been accomplished there since the footbridge replacements of the late 1990s, and the necessity to correct cross drainage problems brought about a project that proceeded in two phases. The first aimed at returning the trail to its original width of three feet and making it more stable, particularly with the use of stepping stones as tread through wet areas. Its second phase included replacing log bollards in the parking area with stone masonry piers connected by log cross members. Drainage from the parking lot created a gully through the initial section, so crew members raised the tread with some benching and apparently solved the problem.215
A new trail guide for the wildflower garden made its debut in late 2010, as the first in an effort to update the three interpretive booklets written for pedestrian loops in 1982.216 The only other guide to an individual trail published since completion of the Lady of the Woods Loop (formerly “Park Headquarters Historic Walking Tour”) in 1999 was one for the Garfield Peak Trail in 2004. Funded by the non-profit Crater Lake Institute, it initially appeared a year earlier but underwent considerable revision and redesign, only to disappear in the wake of the trail crew’s maintenance project on Garfield Peak.217 A bequest to the Crater Lake Natural History Association triggered publication of a guide to all of the park’s maintained trails in 2010, whereby the CLNHA ended its support of the guide by Connie Toops that had first appeared in 1980. The new volume by William L. Sullivan dropped several routes utilizing motorways, but included new trails and others rerouted since the Toops guide was last revised in 1995.218
In addition to the Lady of the Woods Loop and the trail reroutes implemented since 1999, the Sullivan guide included a trail not completed until after his book was in print. Dubbed the “Plaikni Falls Trail” at the suggestion of Perry Chocktoot, Jr., director of the culture and heritage department of the Klamath Tribes, this route linked a new trailhead on the Pinnacles Road with a cataract at the base of Anderson Bluffs. Climbing 140 feet over its length of one mile, it allows visitors to view a portion of Sand Creek below Anderson Spring in the final third of the hike.219 It is one of the few with stone benches and even wayside exhibits built in several places along the route, and proved popular not least because of publicity generated through the park newspaper.
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| Trailhead for route to Plaikni Falls, 2012. Photo by the author. |
