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| Campers in what later became known as Rim Village, about 1910. Courtesy of the Klamath County Museum. |
Very little of the proposed trail mileage ultimately materialized from the Corps, mainly because work to grade approach roads and a circuit route along the rim took precedence during the project, which began in 1913 and terminated at the end of June, 1919. The Corps spent just two-thirds of the amount they originally estimated, almost all of it on a road system that never went beyond the grading phase of construction. When the Corps finally left the park, the entire project stood at roughly 50 percent complete. It included building only one trail, but even that one initially served the purpose of allowing for construction crews and equipment to pass between the ends of graded sections on the Rim Road near the Watchman. Less than a mile in length, the trail went up the south side of Watchman and over to what was later called the Watchman Overlook. One engineer described it as having been built in a “cheap” manner during the summer of 1916, varying in width between three and four feet, and on an average grade of 20 percent. He contended that it should be considered part of the proposed trail system since the route shortened distances by foot or saddle horse along the back of the Watchman and could be used by visitors to ascend the peak, where a fire lookout had been built in 1917.17
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| On the way to Huckleberry Mountain from Fort Klamath, about 1900. Courtesy of the Hescock family. |
William Gladstone Steel succeeded Arant as park superintendent from 1913 to 1916. His most pressing concern in regard to trails was the route to Crater Lake, which required considerable work during his first summer in the job. As a follow up, Steel recommended that another $200 be spent to remove rocks from the trail so that burros (which he wanted the park concessionaire to rent for the use of visitors) could pass over it.18 Conditions on this trail had scarcely improved two years later, when a visit by William Jennings Bryan, the recently resigned U.S. Secretary of State, prompted Steel to pitch the need for a tunnel to the lake. Such a device could obviate the need for a “laborious one thousand feet or more steep descent and climb over a slippery and dangerous trail,” something Bryan considered “almost impossible for old people.”19 Despite the publicity, the tunnel proposal never gained traction, though it prompted Steel’s supervisor, General Superintendent of National Parks Mark Daniels, to recommend that new trail “be built as near to the water’s edge as possible and as far around the lake’s shoreline as practicability will allow.”20
