Shortly after that, with the fact that the permanent suspension for Mr. Gould came through, I was then put in the position of being storekeeper and they sent out for a regular cook. They brought a little guy in here by the name of Jimmy Fader. We had, at that time, on trial, as I understand it, one of the first ideas of a snow sled. It was a very simple device and not very practical. Anyhow, they made a couple of trips with it from here to the South Entrance. They brought this Jimmy Favor in on it from Fort Klamath and they lost him off the sled somewhere along the line and had to go back and find him. He came in and took over and I took over in the warehouse. That was my job during the rest of my stay here.
We had some interesting experiences, as you can well imagine. The year that this (photo) was taken, which would have been January of 1936, we just had the one plow here. It was on New Year’s Day and we had made a run to the rim and it was snowing lightly. We got up to the rim and were plowing out the turn around area and snapped a drive shaft between the main engine and the snow rotor. We went back down to camp and the long and the short of it was, we had a storm that continued for 19 days. We had to order, a part from Dubuque, Iowa, by rail. It came in to Chiloquin and they took one of two caterpillars that they had up here that they used in conjunction with the snow removal. You had it explained to you how they removed the snow in the old days, one cat ahead and the other breaking down in front of the rotary and the rotary would blow it out? Anyhow the had to walk this tractor to the South Entrance when we got word by phone that the part had arrived, and then walk it back up here. It took hours. We lashed a 50 gallon drum of gasoline on the tractor to insure enough fuel to make the round trip. Two men rode the tractor. It was somewhere like three weeks before we had the snow plow back in operation. In the meantime, it was 19 days of steady snowfall. The average was about two to six inches a day. It wasn’t blizzard conditions, but snow fell every day, constantly. We then had to regain the road that we had lost.
