On Decoration Day of 1937, when my sister was here taking care of Sadie- we had our oldest girl in March- we had an incident with a group of young people, a church group from Medford that came up on a bus for a day. We had a rope tied across, a barrier, although simple, out on stakes driven in the snow, to keep people behind the edge. It was on the rim just this side, as near as my memory tells me, of the Information Building. These youngsters were cavorting and throwing snowballs on the wrong side of the rope and this girl lost her footing and went clear to the lake’s edge. We had to rescue the body and it was a rather harrowing experience. Her father got up here and it was all that people could do to restrain him from going over the rim. What we did was bring the cherry picker up and the rangers got what they call a Navy Stretcher. Just to the west of where the old trail used to kick off there was kind of a natural saddle and slide, covered with snow that took you clear to the water’s edge (7). We left about four men and passed them down to the water’s edge. We had to have additional cable. In those days, the Park Service had a rowboat that they stored under a ledge so that when they were ready to get over to the island and get the park boat they could get this rowboat out. It was in such place that the snow didn’t interfere with it. This ledge, incidentally, was near this saddle. They went down and worked their way around to the boat. They got the boat out and came on around and got the body. They brought it on around and attached it and hauled it back up. This happened around noon and it was after dark before we ever got the body up here. That was one incident.
Then one summer, I can’t recall the date, I was in Medford on business and stopped to have a bite of supper before I came home. I went into the restaurant and took a paper and when I opened it up the headline said, “Boy dies at Crater Lake.” The story to that was, as I recall and piece the fragments together, there was a professor traveling in a group of three or four boys and they drove up to the rim. The kids hopped out, a group of them, and these two grabbed their suits and jumped the wall and dashed over. One of them stopped in time, but the other one was ahead and he couldn’t stop and he went to his death. It was somewhere in the area between the trail beginning and the Sinnott Memorial. He just dashed over. It was unreal. That was another time.
