The park’s total appropriation for the 1905 season amounted to only $3,000, and trail improvements did not feature as a budget item since much of the work that summer focused on completing a new wagon road to the rim through Munson Valley. In his annual report, Arant described what he considered to be the other park trail of that time, one that departed from the undeveloped campground on Dutton Creek and went west and northwest to Bybee Creek, eventually heading out of the park.12 He also thought it needed improvement, describing the trail in his report for 1909 as little more than “mere tracks of horses being ridden from one point to another.”13 Appropriations had increased enough in 1908 for locating and marking a trail from the park headquarters (at that time located at Annie Spring) over to the Pinnacles on Wheeler Creek and then to Mount Scott. It, and what amounted to another set of tracks from headquarters to the base of Union Peak, scarcely rated any better in Arant’s estimation than the path that went past Bybee Creek.14
Arant urged that the route to Mount Scott be converted to a wagon road in order for visitors to enjoy greater access to that part of the park, but he lacked the funding necessary (estimated at roughly $250) to make it happen. Trails, of the kind that furnished a beaten track as a precursor to more permanent development, represented an inexpensive device that had the potential to enhance the park’s popularity in advance of the funding needed for automobile roads or facilities like hotels. He therefore proposed a trail along the rim to Watchman and Hillman Peak, as well as another starting from an unspecified point on the road leading through Munson Valley to what later became known as Rim Village. The latter might take visitors on horseback to Crater Peak, and then down Sun Creek.15
Only one of Arant’s proposals for improved trails or additional routes came into being while he served as superintendent from 1902 to 1913. A small crew improved the trail down to Crater Lake in 1910, but this work largely derived from the presence of H.L. Gilbert from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who arrived in the park that summer to begin location studies for a system of roads and trails. To be built by the Corps from annual appropriations over multiple years, the system included trails as a small item in their total estimate of the $627,000 needed for construction. The share for trails amounted to a total of $15,000, thought to be sufficient for building 100 miles of trails to “afford accessibility to points of minor interest in the park, and to portions remote from any of the [proposed] wagon roads.”16
