Douglas Larson

Douglas Larson Oral History Interview

Interviewer and Date: Stephen R. Mark, Crater Lake National Park Historian, February 14, 2000

Interview Location: Douglas Larson’s residence, Portland, Oregon, United States

Transcription: Transcribed by Kelli Bacher, Spring 2000

Biographical Summary (from the interview introduction)

Larson, Douglas W. Limnologist; worked intermittently on Crater Lake 1967-85.

John Salinas provided me with Doug Larson’s address about a year ago, and this led to a fruitful exchange of information that eventually included a taped interview. Dr. Larson continues to actively pursue limnological studies at a number of localities in Oregon and Washington even after retiring from the U.S. Amy Corps of Engineers. His work at Crater Lake, however, ceased in 1985 because of a controversial hypothesis about decline in the lake’s optical properties. Whatever the merits of this hypothesis, it (more than any other single factor) provided the basis to create a monitoring program that is now an ongoing part of National Park Service operations at Crater Lake National Park. The following transcription resulted from the better portion of a day spent at his residence in Portland. Additional information, including copies of published articles by Dr. Larson, can be found in the park’s history files.

Materials Associated with this interview on file at the Dick Brown library at Crater Lake National Park’s Steel Visitor Center

taped interview; correspondence, copies of published articles, and donated slides. Copy of Douglas Larson’s Ph.D. thesis in the park library along with other research.

To the reader:

Stephen R. Mark
October 2000

Where did you grow up? What is your educational background?

I was born in Moline, Illinois, June 22, 1937. I lived there for four years and my dad moved us to Jamestown, North Dakota in 1941. My dad was a locomotive engineer on the Northern Pacific Railroad. He had started as a railroad fireman in 1928 and during the ’30s he was laid off periodically. My dad would have to go back to North Dakota and work, and he’d leave the family in Illinois. At the start of World War 2 he was able to get a full time job because the railroads were hauling war materials. There were a lot of jobs and lots of men were being drafted into the military, so we moved there in June ’41. That’s why I grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota.

I graduated from high school in 1955 and then I went into the Marine Corps for four years. I started college in September 1959, at a little school in North Dakota called Jamestown College. It is a little liberal arts college, maybe 1000 – 1200 students, a Presbyterian school and has been there since the 1880s. I went there for four years and received my bachelor of science degree in biology. I took all pre-med courses because they didn’t offer any ecology courses. I graduated in 1963, but wasn’t sure what I was going to do after that. I guess like so many students I didn’t know what I wanted to do. After expressing my interest in science to my freshman advisor, he steered me into biology. I wasn’t overly enthusiastic about it because all of the courses were pre-med courses. I was taking comparative anatomy, embryology and medical-related subjects. None of that really interested me. After graduation I was offered teaching jobs in small towns in North Dakota. I finally decided however, that I’d go back to school and get a masters degree.

That fall, 1963, I drove up to the University of North Dakota and asked the biology department if I could enroll. In those days they were building their departments because science was being heavily funded (1). Graduate schools were open to anyone who had a bachelors degree. They had money, and opportunities to do research. I received a teaching assistantship and started working. My thesis research was on salamanders in North Dakota, emphasizing the physiology and ecology of one particular species. My research confirmed what some people had believed for a long time, that the subspecies are distributed in accordance with a moisture gradient across the state from east to west. The eastern part of North Dakota in the Red River Valley, for example probably receives 10 inches more rain than the Badlands in the western part. I was quite interested in my masters thesis research, but after I received my masters, the question was “where do I go from here?” I was married, my wife was a teacher, and so I decided maybe I could pursue a Ph.D. Much of my coursework was in genetics, evolution, speciation, and those kinds of things, but things were starting to tighten by 1965. Funds weren’t as readily available as they had been because of the Vietnam War.

Things were tightening up and my major advisor talked about a Ph.D. program at the University of New Mexico but I really didn’t want to go there. I had a friend who was working on Devils Lake in North Dakota. That’s where he did his masters on phytoplankton primary production and nitrogen cycling. Anyway, he said the University of North Dakota had just received an Office of Water Resources research grant to study Devils Lake since it was part of the Garrison diversion project, and they didn’t have anyone to work on chironomids. The chironomids, midges, look like little mosquitoes, but they’re biting insects. He said we would like someone to come on board now that they had grant money. It meant that I would be on a research assistantship, rather than teach. The job would last for three or four years, and I was to receive a little stipend and a tuition waiver. That was a great opportunity, so starting in the fall of 1965, I began working on Devils Lake studying the chironomids.

Did that position involve a transition for you, away from salamanders?

Yes, it did require me to do a lot of background work. I spent a lot of time in the library collecting papers and doing literature searches. I used to have a huge pile of stuff on benthic organisms in lakes. Dave Anderson, who urged me to join them on Devil’s Lake, gave me a 200 page paper by C.H. Mortimer. He published on the sediment processes of lakes in 1940 – 41. It really stimulated my interest in limnology. I worked there for a couple of years and had to take a lot of coursework.

During this two-year period of 1965 to 1967, I was taking coursework and preparing for exams in two languages. They required German and French for a Ph.D. at that time. They also required me to take calculus. During this time my initial advisor, John Owen, decided that he wanted to focus on other kinds of research. As one of his graduate students, I was shifted to a new fellow, Joe K. Neal. He was a famous biologist and limnologist from back east, maybe from the University of Kentucky. He was nearing the end of his career and wanted a place to write a book. The University of North Dakota offered him a full professorship and he supervised two graduate students, Dave Anderson and me. Dave and I were working on our dissertation topics on Devils Lake. I began to have weekly meetings with Joe K. Neal during the fall of 1966 and in time it turned out that Joe and I didn’t get along. I can’t really pinpoint what the problem was, but we just didn’t get along and I could see it was going to be difficult. He just didn’t seem interested in my research and I couldn’t really get help from him. I couldn’t even get him to go in the field with me to show him what I was doing. I then secretly made plans to leave North Dakota and started to send queries to different universities. These were out west because my sister lives in Tacoma. One of my letters went to Oregon State and I got a phone call one night from Jack Donaldson. He was just starting there, been in Corvallis for about a year. This was about March of 1967, and he had a grant to study the lakes of Oregon in order to classify them. Jack was looking for people to bring on board and wanted two or three people to do this work. It was another research assistantship where I wouldn’t have to teach, and carried a stipend plus the tuition waiver. The doctorate was a three-year program, so I talked it over with my wife. It was a nice opportunity and I had heard that Oregon State and Oregon were both renowned universities. Unfortunately this has changed, but at that time they were both highly respected at least where I was living. A lot of people wanted to go there, thinking these were top universities and at the time they were.

They had money.

That and they also had prestige. They were relatively small but desirable. We moved out here in July 1967. I proceeded to work with Jack Donaldson on classifying the lakes of Oregon. Initially, I really didn’t know what to do. I felt that his subject was rather broad since there are 6000 lakes in the state and 2000 of those are named. I didn’t know how he was going to do all that in three years.

Did it relate to the Atlas of Oregon Lakes?

That publication wasn’t around of course, but it was sort of like that. I think that’s what he wanted to do since there was virtually nothing available on lakes of Oregon. Most of the lakes hadn’t been studied, but there was some information that the fishery people had collected. They were stocking lakes and looked at them as habitat for fish, so in the process, they collected limnological data. R.C. Newcombe, for example, did this for several Cascade lakes and the Forest Service collected data for some of their lakes in the Cascades. The first thing I did was collect all the literature I could find. I traveled around the state and pulled together all the information I could find on these lakes. Then I began to formulate a thesis. One of the ideas I had was to look at the Warner Valley lakes located east of Lakeview. I thought it would be interesting to look at a salinity gradient going back to my old days working on the salamanders. I thought that it’s conceivable that there’s a salinity gradient, that the lakes get more saline further north. My hypothesis was that these lakes would offer different habitats because there is a salinity gradient. Organisms in Blue Joint Lake, for example, at the upper end of the valley might be more tolerant to salinity and adverse limnological conditions than those living in the deeper and fresher lakes in the southern end of the valley. In the fall of 1967, Jack and I drove down there and it turned out that summer was one of the driest ones on record. These lakes were really diminishing and we talked to the water master for Lake County. He warned me that it was possible these lakes could dry up by the next summer and I wouldn’t have a study site. This meant I could lose a whole year. Since I had dropped my Ph.D. at North Dakota I had already been in graduate school for four years, having spent two additional years at North Dakota after my masters. Those years were lost time except that I was able to transfer all my credits. When I first came to Oregon I already had four years as an undergraduate, and another four years as a graduate student at North Dakota. I didn’t want to spend five years more since I was getting older and had been in the Marines. I was over 30 and I didn’t want to spend my entire life in school, so I made it clear that I wanted to graduate by 1970. I wasn’t going to spend my life in Corvallis, especially since I’d never seen so many people who were working on masters and doctorates who had been at OSU for a lifetime it seemed like.

It was in that era of cheap tuition.

Yes. One guy had been working on a masters for 12 years, I couldn’t believe it. My wife encouraged me to put a limit on my stay because she was a teacher and didn’t want to support me forever. I had misgivings about working in the Warner Valley because of the possibility that these lakes could dry up and there goes my study. Jack countered with something about studying Crater Lake. We were comparing the lakes of Oregon and I said there are a lot of lakes here that are classified as oligotrophic. I said that classification is based on their level of production and I said Crater Lake is oligotrophic, and so is Waldo (2). At least that’s what they say in the literature; so are Odell Lake and Woahink on the coast (3). My thesis was centered on the question about whether these lakes are the same, even though they were all classified as oligotrophic (4).

Why Woahink?

I wanted to give the thesis some diversity by including a coastal lake. If we would have had more money and time I would have looked at a place like Wallowa Lake (5).

I might have considered another mountain lake.

I had Crater, Odell and Waldo, but I thought I’d get one on the coast. I thought about Wallowa in the Blue Mountains but that was a long trek over there and we didn’t have a lot of money and time. I wanted to focus on these four and in those days, in the field of limnology, there was a lot of emphasis on eutrophication, and oligotrophic lakes, and classification. Those days are gone. People don’t do that anymore.

Because it is considered descriptive work?

It’s descriptive and who cares? In those days there was a lot of concern about lake classification. It was kind of the old school.

Taxonomy?

Yes, taxonomic stuff. The thrust then was on eutrophic lakes because a lot of money was coming from EPA to look at lake eutrophication. I started out using Crater Lake as a baseline lake. It is probably an ultra oligotrophic lake, but it turned out to be far more productive than Waldo Lake. Waldo Lake became the baseline lake because it has almost zero production. Not zero, but certainly levels of production that were so low that there was nothing in the literature that could equal it. I finished that work, wrote my thesis, and graduated in June, 1970. After that I spent a year on a post doc at OSU. I graduated at an unfortunate time. After 1969 there were two things going on in jobs related to my field. It was an inverse relationship. Job opportunities were going down, down, down, quite rapidly because of the Vietnam War and the lack of funding (6). Yet there was an exponential increase in the number of people being produced because the universities geared up to produce graduate students. All major universities, particularly the ones like OSU, had gotten a lot of money to do research related to the environment. They had greatly expanded their departments and graduate schools and they were producing many, many more people than were really needed, so we ended up with a surplus of graduates competing for fewer and fewer jobs. Unfortunately I fell into the category where there just weren’t any jobs. Donaldson was able to get me some grant money and I more or less finished up his project. I won’t say he lost interest in the thing, but he was overwhelmed with other issues. I thought the least we can do is show some accountability here, so I spent the summer and early fall of 1970 putting together a report on the lakes of Oregon. It consisted of 150-page report, which named all the lakes, and it categorized them by physiographic regions. I had coastal lakes, Cascade lakes, ones in the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon, and so forth.

Did you visit all of them?

Oh, no. What I did was I went to the Oregon Department of Transportation in Salem. They had township maps, big ones. I searched all those maps for lakes, every one. I recorded every lake that was plotted. If it wasn’t named, I called it an unnamed lake. I ended up with about 1,600 lakes that were listed in my report.

Out of the total of 6,000?

There are supposedly 6,000, but only less than a quarter of those are named or are large enough to be lakes in any real sense.

So you essentially pegged most of them.

Yes, at least the ones that were on the township maps and maps developed from aerial photography. I didn’t have a computer to do this work so it was all done by hand, and it was a lot of work. I compiled the list, and after the name of each lake, I would put numbers indicating any references and any literature about these particular lakes. For example, you’re interested in Wallowa Lake; you find it and the entry gives the township and range. There are series of numbers after it, maybe 17, 35,45 or something, and those numbers relate to the bibliography. You would then go to the bibliography and find 35 and obtain a citation for a study that was done on Wallowa Lake. I thought it had some usefulness because people who were interested in the lakes of Oregon, not only to know where these lakes are located and what physiographic region, but what’s available as far as other research studies.

Did masters students work with you on this project, like Jim Malick and Owen Hoffman?

It was just me on that one. Owen was gone by that time. Malick was still there working on his masters, but he was working independently after I graduated. He finished his masters in ’71 and then went to the University of Washington for his doctorate.

Were there just the three of you under Donaldson?

Yes.

A very small department.

Yes, it was just the three of us. Jim Malick and I worked together, he was looking at the zooplankton in Crater, Waldo, Woahink and Odell lakes.

You were interested in phytoplankton?

Yes. I also wanted to describe general limnological features and some basic water chemistry. We were doing zooplankton totals for Jim and primary production. One of the problems we had related to facilities. When I arrived at OSU I was close to appalled at the lack of facilities to do research. Donaldson was in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. There was virtually no facility to do limnological research. I didn’t realize this until I arrived and then realized that I made a mistake. I wished I had gone to the University of Washington where they had a bona fide limnological program under Tommy Edmondson.

Where were the facilities?

It was in an old building they called Extension Hall. It was sort of kiddy corner from Oceanography. Maybe three or four stories, it was brick. There was a little building they called the annex, and it was a former residence. Some of the professors had their offices there and they had a little lab.

Weren’t a lot of the faculty funded through grants?

Faculty in the department of fisheries and wildlife were, for the most part, teaching some courses and getting grants. Donaldson received his grant from the Office of Water Resources, in the Department of Interior. That money was funneled to the Water Resources Research Institute at OSU. They, in turn, had this fund where people could request money.

When I graduated, Donaldson brought on a new guy named Ross Kavanagh to do a masters. I spent quite a busy summer in 1970. My daughter was born in July and I was doing a report for Donaldson on the project. I was also helping train Ross Kavanagh for his work. I took him [Kavanagh] to Crater a couple of times with me and he didn’t like that at all.

Why?

He was a smoker and just about died coming up the trail. I finally got him interested in coastal lakes, and by then Donaldson was really kind of out of the picture. I kind of took charge of Kavanagh and we took field trips down to the coast and he selected Devils Lake, Mercer, Munsel, Siltcoos, Woahink as his study lakes (7). We would go over there once every two weeks or so through the summer. By the middle of October, 1970, I had completed the report. I still couldn’t find work and things were looking kind of bad because the winter was coming. I finished the report and the Water Resources Research Institute published it. At least it showed accountability. We spent thousands of dollars and I thought we should have something to show for it than just a couple of theses.

Was this your post-doc?

No, not really. I received a small stipend for it. I was waiting to hear about a job. When October rolled around I finished it. Ross Kavanagh was pretty well trained and ready to go on his own. Things were starting to get tough. My wife and I had a three month old baby and she decided to go back to work. I had an offer from EPA in North Carolina, but didn’t want to go there. So I thought we’ll stick it out here and I’ll wait for a job. I kept sending out letters but nothing turned up. I finally got desperate and decided I would put my name in at the employment office because I needed to work. I couldn’t sit around home. The university didn’t have anything for me. Two job offers came. One was washing dishes in a restaurant. The other one was working for a guy named Timian who was a contractor in Corvallis. There are a couple streets named after him; Timian Way or something. He was building these FHA 235 homes and he needed people to frame houses (8). I said I’ll take the job and started working there in October. It paid minimum wage, with no union benefits and you couldn’t work when it rained because he’d lay off the crew. I wasn’t making much money but worked well enough that when he laid off the framing crew, he had me go over to his garage and paint bats. That job went through Christmas. In January I got a call from Harry Phinney, who had been on my doctoral committee. He was a professor there in the Department of Botany and Plant Physiology at OSU. He said: “Doug, I heard that you’re working as a carpenter. I think I can do better for you. I’m working on a grant that the Army Corps of Engineers has given us to study Hills Creek Reservoir.” He added: “It would be great if you could come on board and do the limnology for us. We need to have a limnological component there and I’m in charge of that part, but I don’t want to go in the field all the time.” I said great so I did that and that as my post-doc. I was called a research associate on that one, and I worked at Hills Creek Reservoir near Oakridge until September, 1971. There were a lot of people working on that project, engineers, hydrologists and soils people. It was a turbidity study.

Did that drive the funding?

Hills Creek Reservoir, which is on the Middle Fork of the Willamette, had a real problem with turbidity. They were logging the bejebbers out of the watershed and that area has a lot of very fine clay that would wash down into the reservoir. It had this turbidity problem and the Corps wanted to know why. They formed an interdisciplinary team and we published our findings at the end of that study. It appeared in 197 1, and was a 350 page report published by the OSU Water Resources Research Institute.

To back up just slightly, the article you published in 1972 about your dissertation, how did that come about?

That’s something else I was doing part time on my own, mainly in the evenings. After I graduated, I decided I would try to publish my doctoral thesis or portions of it. One thought I had was that no one had really published anything on [the limnology of] Crater Lake. I wrote a letter to an editor of the Journal of Limnology and Oceanography and asked if they would be interested in this topic. They said yes, so I submitted a paper and had it published (9). I felt pretty good about it because they only publish about 35 percent of the papers submitted. They certainly don’t publish descriptive papers like that anymore, pretty much experimental stuff.

I worked there (Hills Creek) until the summer of ’71, then took a job with the DEQ in Portland (10). I started there in October, 1971, and I worked at DEQ until 1974, when I was hired by the [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers in Portland to write environmental impact statements.

Let’s go back to Crater Lake, during that period when I did my dissertation there. I see question 2 here, “What brought Jack Donaldson to OSU?” and “How did he influence your choice of Crater Lake as a study area for your dissertation?”

Jack came to OSU after finishing his doctoral thesis. He studied Lake Iliamna in Alaska and looked at phosphorous from fish carcasses there. Salmon migrating into the lake, they die, their carcasses decay, they release large quantities of phosphorous. He was interested in this part of the nutrient cycle. His dad, of course, was a very famous fish biologist at the University of Washington. Loren, by the way, just recently died at age 95 last year. A job came up at OSU and Jack applied for it. Carl Bond, the fishery biologist at OSU was Jack’s mentor. He, of course, knew Loren and Jack, so he supported Jack’s hiring. There were a couple of other people who had applied from UC Davis. When I got there Jack wasn’t even clear about how he was going to approach this massive project. The first field trip we made was to go to Crater Lake, but I went along with Jack to observe. He went down to monitor Owen’s [Hoffman] progress. He took me out in the boat on that trip in July, 1967. My research didn’t get started there until 1968, the following summer. Owen and Donaldson had done some C-14 in July, 1967, and that was the first profile ever done of the lake. There were other lakes we considered for candidates to compare with Crater.

How much linkage was there at OSU between limnology and oceanography?

go out and count ducks — a lot of descriptive stuff, but old methods. The only real research scientists there in my opinion were Dr. Charles Warren and Dr. Peter Doudoroff. Those two were doing what I thought was cutting edge research in looking at the effects of reduced dissolved oxygen on fish growth, and behavior, and those sorts of things. I would have loved to be in their program, but I really wasn’t interested in those topics. I was looking for that type of research program in limnology, but it just didn’t exist. I regretted the fact that I went to OSU, but it wasn’t Donaldson’s fault. He was starting the program and his job was to develop it.

How much linkage was there at OSU between limnology and oceanography?

None. There was really no limnology program. It was really a fisheries program. In fact my doctorate says fisheries. I know virtually nothing about fish. Limnology was sort of a little field in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. I think one of the things that Donaldson was disenchanted with, or demoralized by, was the fact that it wasn’t getting serious consideration as a discipline. I think the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife was an old boy network of guys who liked to hunt and fish. Their idea of research was to go out and count ducks — a lot of descriptive stuff, but old methods. The only real research scientists there in my opinion were Dr. Charles Warren and Dr. Peter Doudoroff. Those two were doing what I thought was cutting edge research in looking at the effects of reduced dissolved oxygen on fish growth, and behavior, and those sorts of things. I would have loved to be in their program, but I really wasn’t interested in those topics. I was looking for that type of research program in limnology, but it just didn’t exist. I regretted the fact that I went to OSU, but it wasn’t Donaldson’s fault. He was starting the program and his job was to develop it.

Things you can’t know until you get there.

Yes. I was really disappointed.

Has limnology since flowered or has it always taken a back seat to fish?

It’s always taken a back seat. I think Stan Gregory is the limnologist at OSU now.

I took some courses in oceanography and I was very impressed with the faculty and the courses. They were demanding and were truly science courses. Some of them were a little over my head but I plowed ahead and got through. I took three or four courses in oceanography. I was forced to take three terms of Ichthyology from Carl Bond. It was descriptive stuff and I protested vigorously. Bond was on my committee and insisted that I take his three quarter course in Ichthyology. The first quarter was devoted to fish anatomy, where I actually had to boil a fish, remove all the skeletal parts, and glue them back together to construct a skeleton of this fish. I thought this was stuff that you might do as freshman or sophomore in college, so I was really disappointed. I wasn’t really getting hard science, like a course on the ecology of fish. That would be adequate because as a limnologist you have to know something about fish. They are part of the lake ecosystem, but to have to wade through three terms of ichthyology? As I said my favorite courses were in oceanography. They were well taught by guys like Larry Small

and Herb Curl. One of them made the [first] winter trip on Crater in 1971. I forget his last name.

I really didn’t like oceanography as a field, but thought boy, if they taught limnology like this, I would learn a lot. I picked up some other courses here and there, like computer science. I had to do German as a [required] language. Most of my field work was done in the summer. I ended up with 400 or 500 credit hours of coursework in my 11 years of college, if you can believe that.

Did you choose German because some of the journals were in German?

That’s an antiquated requirement and I don’t know why they have it anymore. Years ago, the reason that Ph.D. students had to have two languages was that most of the literature was in French and German, and you had to translate it. A lot of the important literature had not been translated, and in order for you to learn about your field, you had to be able to read these two languages. It was aimed at having a reading knowledge. You didn’t have to learn how to speak it, use it, but you had to have a reading knowledge. At the University of North Dakota they required German and French, generally for the biology majors. When I got to OSU they required one language, and you could substitute some computer courses for the second language. In those days, you knew computers were coming. I had to hire a programmer to get my data on cards and we ran these programs.

When I had to take my German, I hired a tutor who was a Romanian. He had a Ph.D. in some field, but worked in animal husbandry at OSU as a common laborer. He spoke beautiful German as well as other languages and he had a little house down by Lincoln School in south Corvallis. I’d drive over there once a week. When I first met with him, he said when you come here next time, you [should] have a book in German. That’s the book you will read from for your test. I went down to the library and I borrowed a biology book in German. He had a fit, saying that I don’t want this book because every chapter is different. It had one chapter on amphibians, birds, mammals, insects and so forth. All these have different terminology. He wanted me to get a book on one subject like fish. I then got a German book on the evolution of fish, so that all through it the terminology was the same. After 100 pages I had mastered this 500 page book. I could read anywhere in it. That’s how they tested you. I spent six months meeting with him every week on Tuesdays, reading to him for two or three hours. If I found a word that I didn’t know, I would write it down and we would work on that. After six months I was able to go to some person on campus who gave these tests. She would take the book and open it up to some page at random. I would have to read the page to her, and that’s how I passed the test. I never used German again.

I know when we took a break I asked you about the NPS infrastructure at Crater Lake to support your work and the work of others around 1970 or so?

Carl Bond and h s student Hal Kibby had apparently used a ranger boat. This is the study that Kibby, Donaldson and Bond published in 1968 or so. They looked at the temperature and currents in the lake (11). They tracked plastic bags partially filled with water around the lake. When Donaldson decided to go down there, Bond had a boat that he’d been using at Klamath Lake for a fish study that he and Harry Phinney had been using. They decided to bring that boat to Crater and they lowered it into the lake. It was probably in the early summer of 1967 when they lowered Bond’s Boston Whaler into the lake. I don’t think the park gave any other support to Donaldson’s program.

Other than perhaps Dick [Brown] being a sort of cheerleader.

I know that Donaldson didn’t get any money from them. There was no equipment provided. We had to Jerry-rig a lot of stuff. I think he had some stuff from [the] Oceanography [department at OSU] that he borrowed. This consisted of deep sea devices to measure temperature. He had some money to buy some nets. We didn’t really have much of anything. I mean it was unbelievable. For example, I wanted to look at the mud/water interface and I tried to make a device that would allow me to take water samples near the bottom. I worked at Oak Creek lab for a month on this thing and it didn’t work. I asked for help and they said there’s some junk up in the attic, do what you can. It was a very primitive situation and I was very disappointed. The only money we had was to pay salaries. I don’t know where Donaldson got the money to buy what little equipment we had. He was able to buy a couple zooplankton nets and had some C-14 stuff. He also bought a camper and a little boat. The boat was so that we could go on the other lakes. We even rigged up a little crane.

Did you ever see the USGS folks who did their study at Crater Lake?

Phillips and Van Denburgh, no (12). I visited Phillips in his Portland office during the summer of ’67 in the process of gathering literature. I went to Portland, Salem, Bend, and visited various agencies to see what they had on lakes of Oregon. Phillips was an older guy and he had a lot of stuff.

As far as what the Park Service provided, it was not even logistical support. They provided the little trail packer that allowed us to haul our gear down the trail. I think we could refuel our boat at the concessionaire’s pump near the dock. We had to keep track of what the boat used and we had to pay for the fuel used. Through the efforts of Dick Brown we were able to stay in the park free, and the camper allowed us to cook our own meals there. We brought our food with us.

Did you stay at headquarters?

We parked at headquarters a couple times, but also a few times in Rim Village.

Where the cabins were?

No, there was a big open field below the lodge. There were trailers and campers parked there (13). We parked there sometimes. It was really a shoestring operation and I could see that I wasn’t going to get a lot of research done. I was going to try to make the best of it, since I couldn’t afford to drop the program and go to another school. I was just getting too old and my wife was getting tired of me being in graduate school. You know what it’s like to be having to study every night and on weekends, then you’ve got term papers. In the summer I’d be gone on these long expeditions around the state, so I wasn’t home much and after three years at OSU she put her foot down. I’d been in school since 1959 and knew it was time to bring this to a halt.

Your field work at Crater was during the summers of ’68 and ’69?

Yes, I made three field trips each summer to the lake. I was training Ross Kavanagh and brought him down there a couple of times in 1970. I recall one particular trip where it was raining with lightning and thunder when we came up the trail. He was just exhausted. The trail packer broke down and we had to haul equipment out by hand. I had to go down a couple times and haul equipment. He just went to the camper and collapsed. It was a bad day and that was my last trip to Crater under Donaldson’s program. It was probably in July, 1970. Donaldson and I had gone down there in June and we had brought the Boston Whaler back to OSU. Incidentally, all of this is documented with pictures. I’ve got several hundred slides.

I’d like to see them.

The pictures also include the work I did in the ’70s and early ’80s I probably have about 800 slides.

Was there any linkage between lirnnology and oceanography? None, really, but Donaldson was sending his students to [the Department of] Oceanography because fisheries and wildlife didn’t offer anything.

To round out your program?

Yes, those courses gave it some meaning.

We’ve taken a short lunch break. Doug is going to continue with his experiences with the Army Corps of Engineers and then coming back to Crater Lake.

I think the last thing I talked about was the linkage at OSU between limnology and oceanography. As I mentioned, there really wasn’t a lirnnology program there. It consisted of Jack Donaldson, who was a new professor, and me, Owen Hoffman and Jim Malick – – the four of us constituted the program. We were not well funded, there was barely any equipment to work with, and our best courses were provided by oceanography.

The next question says “How did you obtain funding for travel and equipment ordered for your dissertation project?” I think I’ve mentioned this earlier that Donaldson obtained a three-year grant from the Office of Water Resources Research, Department of the Interior. That money was made available to OSU through the Water Resources Research Institute there and Donaldson got a grant that was renewed each year. Most of the money went for salaries.

No stockpile in the department?

Right, I think Bond provided Donaldson with money. Carl Bond seemed to get little grants where he was able to augment our equipment.

You asked, “did your project take longer than anticipated to complete?” I think the project that Donaldson attempted, the study of Oregon’s lakes and their classification, was really a big chunk to bite off initially. I felt a little uneasy with it in view of the amount of time that was being given to do the work, and the capacity we had in terms of personnel and equipment to do the work. We’re talking about a state that’s 98,000 square miles. In any case, the best we could do is study the four lakes that I picked for comparison. We visited a few other lakes sporadically such as East Lake and Paulina Lake (14). Most of our work was concentrated on the four lakes: Crater, Odell, Waldo and Woahink. Then when Ross Kavanagh came on board in 1970 to replace me, he looked at four coastal lakes for his masters thesis. Ross Kavanagh graduated in 1973 and then went to work for the Park Service in Alaska. Incidentally, he married one of Carl Bond’s daughters.

You asked, “Why the gap in your work at Crater between ’72 and ’78?” As I was saying my last actual data gathering trip for my thesis was in August, 1969, at Waldo Lake. I then terminated all my fieldwork so I could write my thesis in order to finish by next June. My last field trip to Crater was in 1970. I then spent a couple years writing up the research, not only on the Crater Lake work, but on the lakes study in general. I started working for DEQ in ‘7 1 as a water quality specialist on different things. Then in July, 1974, I was hired by the Corps as a lirnnologist. I worked in the so-called environmental quality branch. Our job was primarily to write environmental impact statements because of NEPA. The Corps had to grandfather some of their projects, and wrote EISs for existing projects, as well as for projects that were being proposed. I managed contracts and dealt with people who were writing these EISs. We did some of the work in-house but most of it was contract management.

Was much of the planning compliance driven?

Yes. Actually, we were in a planning branch. I’m not sure what the hierarchy looked like there, but in any case, we were writing and contracting EISs. I needed to get out and actually do some research but I needed to get in the field more and was sort of office-bound. Although I was doing a lot of contract management and getting in the field, I wasn’t doing my own research and figured I never would. My ambition was to get out of the Corps and into a university as a professor. In order to be a professor I felt that I had to continue to publish. In order to publish I had to do research. I couldn’t continue to publish my thesis because I had exhausted that source of data.

I decided that one idea was to go back to Crater and resume the work that I had done there. There were a lot of unknowns about Crater and I thought I could address some of them. My main research objective initially was to describe the phytoplankton community since that hadn’t been done. There was some very preliminary information. I had measured primary production by phytoplankton but I didn’t do any studies on the species composition, the abundance of phytoplankton in the lake, or their distribution in the water column. Some of that work had been done in 1940 by Utterbach, Phifer and Robinson from the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington. They spent a few days at Crater in 1940 looking at the phytoplankton in the lake but all that work was really sketchy, very basic and preliminary stuff. After that, there had been some work done on phytoplankton by Sovereign, but most of his work done in the late ’50s was on the periphyton (attached algae) in the lake. I don’t think he did any pelagic work. That meant going out on a boat and looking at the pelagic algae and phytoplankton. So I thought here was a great opportunity. I can get a paper out of this and contribute something to the park. I wrote a letter in April, 1978. I sent it to a guy named Sholly (15). I sent it to Sholly and received a reply saying, “yeah, great, come on down. You’re going to have to provide your own equipment. We don’t have any equipment but we’ll provide you with a person to help you out on the lake. That’s about the best we can do, we don’t have any money. You’ll have to pay for this yourself. We have a program called Volunteers in Parks.” I went down in June and started my first field trip. They had a boat for me and it was a two-man rubber raft. There’s a picture of it in this Oregon Historical Quarterly issue (16). They had a rubber raft available and that was it. There was no winch or anything on it. Just the rubber raft with a three horsepower engine and a couple of oars.

Who was the assistant that the park provided?

There were several. I’ll get to that in a minute. I realized I needed some way to take samples from depth because I wanted to describe the phytoplankton throughout the water column. I had VanDorn bottles and I borrowed quite a bit of equipment from the Corps. In those days I had established a laboratory at Lost Creek Dam down on the Rogue. That lab had quite a bit of equipment. I bought a photometer and already had a transmissometer, and a fluorometer, as well as a lot of VanDorn bottles, and all kinds of equipment. I would take that equipment up to Crater. I borrowed it and took it up to Crater, but didn’t have a boat except for the rubber raft. One thing I needed was some way to sample from a rubber raft and I couldn’t do it with a winch. At the Lost Creek lab I had two of these heavy cast iron winches. They were like miniature cranes, but were heavy and would have sunk the raft. My dad lives in Corvallis and he’s real handy. He had a shop, and I expressed to him my need for a winch, but something that would work using a rubber raft. He came up with a wooden winch. It was actually a big spool. It had a handle on it and a guide. The Corps provided me with some funds and I bought 2,000 feet of rope. I put it on this spool he built and that’s what I used. As long as I positioned this thing right in center of the boat it was stable. You couldn’t crank the stuff out of the water, you had to hand haul the samples. For some of my samples I was going down as deep as 1500 feet, and I would string maybe 10 bottles out. Every 200 feet I would place a VanDorn bottle and I had them all set up to trigger with messengers attached to each one. When the upper one triggered, it dropped its messenger, which triggered the next one down, and so on until we closed all the bottles. In order to get a complete sample through the water column it would take maybe two hours to do all that, and then retrieve all the rope. I had to pull the rope into the boat and then wind up the excess, then continue to hand haul rope up and wind up the excess rope and so forth, until we brought the whole batch back. The first summer I collected a couple hundred samples, I suppose. In addition to that, I was also doing some other things: some basic limnology, looking at thermal profiles, measuring light penetration with the Secchi disk. I deployed the photometer so I was getting a handle on the spectral distribution of light in the water column and so on. I don’t know how many trips [to Crater Lake] I made that summer, probably seven or so. I did it on my own time. I’d take my vacation and go there.

Were they long weekends?

It was usually during the week. I would take vacation time and just do that, or sometimes I would do it in conjunction with my work at Lost Creek. I would take the government car and go to Crater with my supervisor’s permission. My supervisor was able to justify that because the Rogue River’s relationship to Crater Lake. Some of the water that seeps out of Crater may be feeding the Rogue system, who knows.

I know you started some monitoring in ’78. By 1982 your work became the basis for some legislation.

Let me get to that in a round about way. Let me continue with the next question here. It is “How did Dick Brown support your work in his capacity as research biologist?”

I think Dick Brown did the best he could. He was very cognizant of the need for research on the lake. I think he promoted it. I view him as an important person at that time. He made it possible for Donaldson to come down there. The only problem is that the Park Service didn’t provide any support. As far as I know the only one who encouraged this research was Dick Brown. Nearly everyone else I knew down there in the late ’60s were indifferent about this research. To them it was some university people taking some samples. To them it didn’t really relate to the park’s main business of tourism and maintenance.

And then once you left in 1970, was that it?

There was no one [doing research]. Well, I shouldn’t say that. The first winter sampling was done by some OSU oceanographers in ’71. They went down and did some work on thermal properties of the lake. Their winter sampling took place in February, ’71, and this was the first time that any scientists had done sampling at Crater in the winter. I can’t recall their names now.

It’s amazing that they were even able to do it.

I don’t know anything about the actual experience, but it had to be treacherous. There was the threat of avalanches or hypothermia just being in that type of environment. If there had been an accident or somebody had gone overboard, or your boat got stalled or something, it could have been bad. You could die out there from exposure.

In terms of park staffing and infrastructure, it was about the worst possible time that I know of over the last 50 years.

I certainly admire their courage for doing it.

Why did no one follow up with winter study of the lake?

I don’t know. I think it was a one shot deal for them. They had a couple of papers published in Limnology and Oceanography. They may have had the same problem that we did. The Park Service didn’t support them with any money. They probably were using funds from another grant and they decided this would make an interesting study and pursued it. As I point out in my OHQ article there were two reasons why scientists were discouraged from working at Crater Lake between 1902 and 1983 when they finally funded a monitoring program there. One was that the park never made any money available. As far as I know, there was never any offer to help [scientists offset their expenses]. Number two was that the NPS generally did not even offer any kind of assistance with equipment or boats to help scientists overcome the logistical problems. There were tremendous logistical problems to work on the lake, and these logistical problems could have been lessened had the Park Service been willing to cooperate with funding, equipment, and manpower to make these trips possible. Number three the indifference that scientists received when they inquired about doing research there. That was kind of the response we got. When Donaldson and I started working there, there was this we don’t care attitude. The only one who really cared was Dick Brown. That’s unfortunate, but it’s really the truth.

How did the idea of establishing a limnological benchmark at Crater Lake come about?

As I mentioned, because of the big chunk we had bitten off, or at least Donaldson had bitten off, we realized as we got into this and discussed it that we weren’t going to be able to visit all the lakes in Oregon. We had to narrow it down, so I decided on four lakes for my thesis work and thought that Crater Lake would be a baseline. We considered it ultra oligotrophic and thus could compare it against our other three lakes. It turns out, however, that Waldo Lake was actually purer and less productive than Crater. It became our baseline lake.

That question related to Owen giving a discussion paper at the first conference for research in the parks.

Right. I didn’t know that Owen was attending this conference in 1976. I went on my own to New Orleans. It was the first conference on scientific research in the national parks and organized by Bob Linn (17). Owen gave a talk on Crater Lake and I talked about some of my research on the phytoplankton.

The conference didn’t seem to have much to do with what happened in the park two years later? You didn’t get a welcome mat or anything.

No.

Was your interest in Crater Lake increased by having a basis for comparison with other lakes?

Not really. I was just interested in Crater Lake. I wanted to describe the phytoplankton community better and try to do some other things that I was capable of doing. I also had a long range interest, thinking that if I prove myself to the Park Service, by demonstrating my willingness to volunteer and do good work, maybe the Park Service might eventually decide to hire me. So, my long range goal was to get hired by the Park Service as a limnologist at Crater Lake, and I thought it was feasible. I could show them that I did excellent work and that I’m highly motivated, and that I’m dedicated not only to my profession, but to Crater Lake. Maybe this will turn out to be a nice job for my last 20 years in government service. I could spend 20 years there and finish out my career as a federal employee.

How supportive was the Army Corps of Engineers of your work in the park?

I worked in a section called reservoir regulation and water quality and my supervisor was Richard Cassidy. He was a hydrologist and I told him that I was spending some of my vacation time down there, and occasionally visiting Crater on my way to and from the Lost Creek lab. He didn’t seem to be particularly alarmed or interested, just don’t commit the Corps to anything. Those were his words, “Don’t commit the Corps to anything, or don’t make it appear that this is something the Corps is doing.” This brings to mind a rather humorous thought about how I was received at Crater Lake. Some people despised me because I worked for the Corps. I don’t know if they really meant it or not, but some of them really disliked the Corps. Since I worked for the Corps they really didn’t care for me either or they suspected me of being the spearhead for a Corps project down there. So I made fun of it. I said “Yeah we’re interested in doing pump storage here. We’re going to pump water out of Crater Lake down and then generate hydro power, and then pump it back up.” I think some people really believed me. I recall my birthday in June 1979. It was my 42nd birthday and John Salinas wanted to hold a birthday party for me, so he had his wife Marilyn make a cake for me. She made a cake with a dam on it, and the dam had a big crack in it.

As I was saying, Marilyn Salinas made this wonderful cake. I think she was suspicious of me, as were some other employees and their wives because I worked for the Corps. I guess I hadn’t been around long enough to convince them that I’m here as a volunteer in the park and wanted to continue my own personal research. None of this is related to what the Corps is doing, and they could care less that I am here. My immediate supervisor just told me to stay out of trouble, and don’t commit the Corps to anything up there. I think eventually I won hearts and minds of most people up there. They viewed me as a person who wanted to study limnology and provide the Park Service with information about this lake that they are supposedly managing and protecting.

I think it was Sholly, or it could have been Mark Forbes, who wrote a letter to the Colonel and my bosses. The letter told them what I was doing there and more or less requested that they allow me to work there and that my work was important to the Park Service. I think the Corps responded. They said he has to do this on his own time. Crater Lake can’t conflict with his work here at the Corps and the Corps takes no responsibility for anything Larson might do or say. They made sure this was understood between them and the Park Service. This was fine with the park and I worked as a volunteer in the park, VIP.

I bet it made some difference that Mark Forbes was there. He was just hired that year [1978] (18).

Mark was very supportive. Sholly was kind of a wild man, as an ex-Marine [who served in] Vietnam.

Did your Marine Corps background help you interact with Sholly?

Not at all. I don’t think we even talked about the Marine Corps. As far as I’m concerned, there was nothing much to talk about. I kind of liked Sholly. I thought he’s kind of unusual for a Park Service employee because he takes risks. One time they went down the snow chute during the winter and crossed the lake to a cabin located on the other side over by Wineglass and stayed overnight. I thought this was really risky without survival suits on. I wouldn’t do that.

The Park Service asked the Corps of Engineers if they could spare me for 10 percent of my time. They worked out an interagency agreement where I would spend 10 percent of my time working on Crater Lake stuff, either in the field or in my office. The Park Service would then reimburse the Corps for my time. I think this arrangement started in 1981. I was a VIP in ’78, ’79, ’80 and maybe ’81, and then I was on a paid status in maybe ’82, ’83, and ’84, something like that. That’s how it worked out, and 1’11 say more [a little later in the interview] about why the park decided they needed a monitoring and research program.

Who among the park staff did you work with after 1978?

I can’t remember all the names, but certainly Mark Forbes and Sholly were there. Jim Rouse was the superintendent. John Salinas was there and so was a Mike Gilmore.

Do you recall Roger Rudolph?

I vaguely remember him (19). I remember that I enjoyed talking with him. I’m trying to think of a couple others.

Hank Tanski?

Hank Tanski was there, but Hank never helped me in the boat (20). When I started in ’78 the Park Service agreed to provide me with an assistant. They did not allow me to go out on the lake alone. I had enough sense not to go on the lake alone because I needed someone to help me in the boat. Hauling up rope was a two-man job. Sometimes a volunteer would come down with me from Portland but generally the park provided me with the people. Mike Gilmore and John Salinas helped me. I’m trying to think of other folks. Hank Tanski and a guy named Pat Smith did some scuba diving for me in August, 1980 (21). We collected vegetation and they took photographs. The Corps provided me with an underwater camera to take photographs and they took photos around Wizard Island. A guy named Dave Hartesveldt was out there with Scuba gear, too. I’m trying to think of two other people who helped me out in the boat. Dan Sholly and a guy named Bruce Wadlington went down with us a couple times.

A guy named Rick Kirchner also helped me in the boat. I’ve got pictures of Rick and a guy named Seth Phalen in the boat. There was a woman who helped me out in the boat, but I can’t remember her name. She was from California, but I can’t remember her name. Working out of the raft was at times hazardous because a three horsepower engine with two people in the boat loaded down with equipment made our progress across the lake really slow, especially when the winds would kick up. I was with Rick Kirchner one time and we got caught in a thunderstorm out there. We fought mountainous waves just trying to get back to Wizard Island. I didn’t think we were going to make it. We didn’t have survival suits, just life vests. Lightning was flashing over and the waters were a deep sea green. We’d go down into a trough and over the crest of the wave and down into another trough and it was pretty bad. When you went out on the Jake you really had to watch the wind. You could risk being swamped. The problem out there was that no one could help you. After two years we finally got radios out there, but sometimes they didn’t work. Other times we could radio for help if we needed it, but a lot of good that did when there wasn’t anyone around to help you.

In the summer of 1978 I used the raft exclusively since we didn’t have any other boat. In ’79 the USGS brought in a boat that we named the African Queen. We lowered it into the lake in May. I have pictures of this operation; we slid it down a snow chute. The USGS expressed interest in the lake because there was a guy from Woods Hole, a guy named VonHertzen or something, who apparently wanted to do some studies on the lake’s thermal properties. It was a geophysical study of some sort, but focused on thermal properties, so they got this boat called the African Queen. It was available to me sometimes, but not all the time, so I’d end up using the raft sometimes because the GS people were out there doing their thing. I occasionally had access to the African Queen. It was about 20 feet long, an aluminum pontoon boat. I think we purchased a winch for it, so we were able to hand crank stuff, and it was a little more advanced than the wooden thing that we used from the raft. When we launched the African Queen in May, 1979, Dan Sholly and Bruce Wadlington went down with us. They bought survival suits for us. The water was really cold and there was a lot of snow. Dan Sholly jumped into the lake with a survival suit and I have a picture of him floating on his back out there.

In ’79, ’80, and ’81 I used the raft and the African Queen. In 1981 the Park Service bought a new Zodiac boat probably 12 feet long. We used that one a little bit. In June or July, 1981, the African Queen sank. They [NPS] tied it up at Cleetwood and apparently it wasn’t tied securely, so it came loose and was dashed against the rocks. I’ve got pictures of the wreckage. In May, 1982, the Park Service launched a new boat. It was also a pontoon boat to replace the African Queen. We had a hatch in the floor where we could sample straight through. That about covers the boats we used.

How did you meet John Salinas?

John Salinas was a seasonal interpreter. He was originally from California, and I think was teaching high school in Grants Pass. In the summers he and Marilyn would come up to Crater. They had two children. I got to know John and the family real well. They had me down for supper and were very nice to me. I think of all the people that worked with me, John showed the greatest promise. He was a science teacher and he was working on a masters in Chemistry at Oregon State. He was very much oriented towards science and was the person I enjoyed working with most. He showed a lot of interest and enthusiasm. He was also a hard worker, too. When I got him assigned to me I felt it was going to be a good day on the lake.

Were your findings presented formally during these years?

Yes I gave two papers at the second conference on scientific research in the national parks in 1979 at San Francisco. Mark Forbes was a co-author on one of my papers. That paper was about the diminishing optical properties of Crater Lake, or as indicated by the decreasing Secchi disk visibility measurements. The other paper was on phytoplankton. I co-authored that one with Stan Geiger. At the beginning of the [summer] season I would give a talk to the seasonal staff at Crater Lake on my work and what it meant. I had mixed feelings about those presentations. Some of the people were enthusiastic, but other people were skeptical or angry at me for suggesting that the lake may be changing. I think some people felt that I was insulting the National Park Service for not doing its job and protecting the lake. I tried to make my talks as objective and focused as possible on my work. Some people received my presentations negatively and didn’t like my findings. Other people were very much interested and encouraged me to do more work.

Did you work with USGS personnel such as Charlie Bacon or Hans Nelson at any point?

No, I did not. I knew Charlie Bacon, of course, and I think I met Hans Nelson a couple times at meetings.

Did you initiate contact with Denny Smith’s office prior to 1982 (22)?

No, and I’d like to expand on that. What I’d like to do now is talk about what I found beginning in 1978. I was using the Secchi disk and photometer, and the data was showing me that there had been a substantial loss in the lake’s clarity. There was also a substantial change in the spectral properties of the lake. Initially I was trying to be a good scientist. When you’re a good scientist, you try to disprove your own hypothesis and you remain very skeptical of your data until you have enough to conclude something about it. At first I didn’t say anything about my findings, I just continued to take my measurements that summer. I noticed that the Secchi disk readings that I was taking in 1978 were about 30 percent less than those I had taken in 1968 – 69, at least on average. Certainly they were far less than the ones that Arthur Hasler took in the late 1930s. Haslerreported depths of forty meters in the late ’30s. I had one reading in 1968 or 69 that was like 32 meters, but that was taken during a storm, so really it wasn’t a meaningful measurement. I had Secchi disk readings similar to Hasler’s, and I had a world record Secchi disk of 44 meters in July, 1969. At that time I used a Secchi disk that was one meter in diameter. I was finding in 1978 none of my readings were greater than 3 1 or 32 meters.

These were with a smaller disk?

Right, a small disk. I used a big disk once, too, and that reading was about 10 meters less than the record, like 34 meters. All my readings were about 10 meters less than what they had been 10 years earlier. I also deployed the photometer and I found that blue light was being transmitted less than green light. What this suggests in limnology is that when you get a shift from greater transmission in the blue band width to greater transmission in the green band width is that you’re getting more particulate matter in the water, more suspended material. Where blue light is being transmitted the farthest occurs in very clear lakes and in the ocean, where there is very little particulate matter. In these very clear water bodies most of the light scattering is being done by molecules. Water molecules tend to scatter at the very short, or at the very deep blue or blue violet end of the spectrum. That is, at very short wave lengths. In other words, water molecules tend to scatter short wave length light, so when you look at Crater Lake you see this very deep blue color. That’s because what you are seeing is the back scattering of light of short wave length, light primarily or almost entirely scattered by water molecules. As you increase the concentration of suspended matter, you begin to see a shift from the deeper blue. There was a tendency more for the back scattering of the light to be closer to the green wavelength. I’m not sure I’m making myself clear, does that make sense to you?

Yes, it does.

In any case, as the lake becomes more productive there’s more suspended particulate matter, particularly phytoplankton. There’s a shift toward back scattering of the longer wave lengths. You will get a more greenish kind of color and in a lake in which there’s heavy suspensions of clay, for example, the lake will look kind of a jade green because you’re getting a back scattering of light in that strong green range in the total light spectrum.

Back to my story. I was seeing this shift and it told me that the optical properties were changing. Generally speaking, limnologists assume if they see something like this that the lake is becoming more productive. Or that something is happening out there to increase the particulate matter in the water column. That particulate matter could be soil that is being washed off the caldera walls and continues to stay suspended in the water column, or it might be algae or phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are particles and they are suspended in the water column. If it’s an increase in the abundance of phytoplankton, then you ask the question well what’s causing this increase in the abundance? The first thing that comes to mind is nutrient enrichment. More nutrients are being introduced into the system either naturally or by anthoprogenic sources. This would cause the algae to become more productive and therefore more prolific and abundant. Nutrient enrichment will affect the optical properties of the lake because the increased concentration of suspended particulate affects visibility because more light is being scattered. The distance over which you can see in the water column diminishes because more light is being scattered, and less light is penetrating it. More nutrients change the spectral properties, and there’s this shift from the greater penetration of blues to a greater penetration of green. After that first summer I felt there might be a problem here and I thought the park should be aware of this. These could be precursors to a major change. Something could be happening to the lake. Maybe there’s [major] hydrothermal activity going on for all I know, so that nutrients are increasing. Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980 and, of course, in 1978 no one knew this would happen. Perhaps several volcanoes in the Cascade Range were heating up, increased heating in the bowels of Mt. Mazama could, propel warmer water and materials to the surface that had nutrient value; this could increase the production and proliferation of algae.

These were considerations and so during my last field trip to Crater Lake in September, 1978, Mark Forbes and I had lunch. I was going to be there another day and Mark recommended that before I left I should talk to Jim Rouse [the superintendent] and discuss my research. Forbes asked me if I was interested in coming back. I said I was coming back as long as you guys are willing to allow me to use a boat and I can be a VIP. I wanted to continue this work. He said I should visit with Rouse, tell him what you’d like to do, and give him a summary of your research findings. He arranged for me to meet with Rouse, so I met with Rouse in his office shortly before I was gonna leave for Portland the next day. I’ll be frank about this. Jim Rouse was really not interested in what I had to say. He used to refer to me as the man with the disk. I didn’t appreciate this. But in order to work there, I couldn’t raise my objections. I had to swallow it and continue with my work, but I viewed it as an insult. That’s the first thing he said when I walked into his office. Throughout our conversation he seemed more interested with something on his desk and never really paid much attention to what I was saying. That was until I got to the word sewage, then he suddenly looked up and became quite interested in what I had to say. What about the sewage? I said, “Well, Jim, I think based on my findings it is possible, but it’s not certain at all. What we might be seeing here is that the lake is changing and somehow algae are becoming more abundant. The reason they are becoming more abundant is they are getting more nutrients from somewhere. Maybe there’s a natural increase in nutrient availability in the lake, I don’t know. On the other hand, it may be that the lake is receiving septic wastes or something. Is it possible that sewage could get in the lake?” He said, “There’s no sewage going into the lake. We have a couple of pit toilets on Wizard Island but we’ve taken care of those.” I asked about the sewage that comes from the lodge, cafeteria, and the campgrounds. Where does it all go? He said that it goes to the lagoons by headquarters. I replied, “Are you sure that none of that sewage is getting into the lake?” He said yes. I then asked, “How do you know?” He said that our [NPS] hydrologist in San Francisco told me that it’s not going in the lake. I asked if he did a study. Where is the information so we can verify it? Rouse said there isn’t a study, he [the hydrologist] just told me there isn’t any sewage going into the lake. I then said, “How about the lagoons down there?” He replied that sewage can’t get into the lake because the lagoons are located at an elevation that’s below the surface of the lake.

They are supposedly lined, but they are still at 6300 feet (23).

I then asked him if I could come back next year. He said, “Write us another letter like you did this year and we’ll see.” Rouse asked me if Mark gave me an investigator’s report to fill out.” I said, I’ll send it in right away. I still have a copy. I submitted it to Seattle, to the regional office. I summarized my progress that particular summer and discussed this business about possible sewage and eutrophication, then signed it. I sent it up there and never heard another word about it.

I went back to Crater Lake the next three summers and repeated my work. All four summers I obtained the same results as far as Secchi disk readings went. I don’t think I ever had a reading over 35 meters. I never said a word about it to anyone except Rouse, Forbes and perhaps a few other park employees. I’d sit down and talk with him each year before I left the park. Mark Forbes, as far as the management staff up there goes, was really the only one who encouraged my work and expressed interest in what was going on. The other people just seemed indifferent and some people actually felt a little threatened.

I worked at Crater Lake as a volunteer in the park from 1978 through 1981. I continued to document my research findings and each year sent a progress report to the Seattle office pointing out that sewage could be getting into the lake. I never reported this to the news media. I kept it to myself, except that I may have discussed it with Mike Gilmore or John Salinas briefly just as a hypothesis. I’m not sure how this information got into Denny Smith’s hands. He was a congressman from the 4th Congressional District in Oregon. At that time, he was involved with the boundary legislation in Congress. I think that was Public Law 97-250, I believe.

I heard through the grapevine that one of my annual investigator’s reports was passed along by someone in the Park Service to someone in DC, who then gave it to Denny Smith. The next thing I know Denny Smith — this was reported by the Oregonian in December, 1981 — was concerned about the possible pollution of Crater Lake. He wanted to explore any link between sewage disposal up there and the lake’s alleged optical deterioration. Smith proposed to amend the legislation before Congress with an amendment that would direct the Park Service to engage in studies that would determine if the lake was being polluted. I don’t recall the exact wording. The emphasis was placed on finding out if this optical deterioration is real, and secondly, if indeed it is, then determine the source. It called for a long term monitoring program, and was explicit in its direction. It directed the Park Service to find the source of the problem. That was the purpose of this 10-year study. In the few weeks subsequent to this, Jim Larson and a person named Shirley Clark from the regional office called me and asked if I would be interested in working for them on a part time basis to set up a limnological monitoring program for them at Crater Lake (24). I said fine, I’d love to do that. They talked about hiring a fill time lirnnologist there in the long run. They sort of suggested that you’re the man we want. This is what I really wanted. I would like nothing better than to work as the limnologist at Crater Lake. It would have been a wonderful opportunity and was a dream come true. So I said yes, 1’11 do this but stipulated that you’ve got to write a letter to the Corps and request my time.

They wrote this letter dated February 23, 1982. It says:

“Dear Colonel Connell: The National Park Service is initiating an interdisciplinary research and monitoring project for Crater Lake proper. This project has been given high priority by the National Park Service for this fiscal year. There is also a congressional bill which, if it becomes law, will require the National Park Service to conduct studies and implement management actions if necessary to assure that the waters are maintained in a pristine condition. At a recent meeting in Corvallis, scientists from the USGS, Army Corps of Engineers, Oregon State University and private research firms met with National Park Service managers and scientists to examine our current information base for Crater Lake and identify critical information needs. Dr. Doug Larson of your office was a key participant in these discussions because of his past and current research activity in Crater Lake. Dr. Larson’s work has been principally a volunteer effort on his part. As a result of this meeting it was decided that we must have professional limnological expertise to help us design and coordinate the monitoring program, provide quality control to the project and evaluate and report on the data. We estimate that about one-tenth of a man year is required for these tasks. We have informally discussed this subject with Dr. Larson to learn if he might have interest in assisting the National Park Service in an official capacity subject, of course, to your approval. He responded positively to this inquiry. Therefore, we’d like to know if the Corps of Engineers would permit Dr. Larson to assist us in this project. We are prepared to reimburse the Corps up to one-tenth man year salary and benefits for Dr. Larson, and for travel expenses,” blah, blah, blah. It goes on to describe what I would do. It says “We look forward to your reply and hope that you will respond favorably to this request which we hope will benefit your agency as well as ours. If you have any questions contact Jim Larson, Chief Biological Services.” Signed Daniel J. Tobin, Jr., Regional Director.

The Corps approved that but stipulated that I couldn’t work more than 10 percent of my time for the Park Service. I was a part-time employee of the Park Service beginning in the summer of 1982 and I stayed that way until October, 1984.

At that point the colonel got a letter from Daniel Tobin. It said:

Dear Colonel Freedenwald: We wish to express our appreciation to you for allowing Doug Larson to assist the National Park Service with the Crater Lake water quality study. His expertise and knowledge was critical in initiating and guiding the limnological study during its critical formative stages. The Crater Lake study and other aquatic research needs in the region have developed in size and complexity to the point where we have employed a research aquatic ecologist to direct the program. Therefore, we will not need to renew the interagency agreement for Doug’s services. Again, thanks.

On October 5, I got this letter from the Park Service also signed by Daniel Tobin,

Regional Director. It said:

“Dear Dr. Larson: We would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to you for your work on the Crater Lake project. Your assistance in initiating a limnological study by offering your knowledge and expertise and the devotion of your own time to the project certainly contributed to the success of the project thus far. As you know the project along with the other research needs in the region have grown and become sufficiently complex that we have hired a research aquatic ecologist, Dr. Gary Larson. As project leader, Gary has responsibility for the conduct of the study, however, due to your long term work on the lake we would like to keep in touch with you to insure an orderly transition period and to allow you adequate opportunity to publish. Gary will be contacting you soon if he has not done so already. Crater Lake is an important natural resource which the National Park Service must manage in such a way as to leave it unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. We offer our thanks for your part in helping us fulfill that mandate.”

I always viewed that letter as a nice way of saying, “get your ass out of here, we don’t want you around anymore.” I can explain that a little better. Let me go back to 1982.

In 1982 through most of ’84 I was working as a part time employee. My responsibility was to establish a limnological monitoring and research program at Crater Lake. This involved setting up a laboratory, buying equipment, training people, going to meetings, being sort of an all around limnologist. In addition to all that, I was doing research on the lake. I did a lot more than ten percent of the time. I probably spent a lot of my own time trying to get it all done — writing reports and seeing that all the work got done. This was fine and I certainly liked what I was doing. Things went well until a meeting held in Seattle in the fall of ’82. Let me first go back to January ’82. At that point we had a meeting in Corvallis attended by a number of scientists from OSU and elsewhere. We talked about a legitimate program for the park and about the possibility of optical changes in the lake and so forth. This was discussed in that day-long meeting, and led to me being hired as a part-time employee.

The shit began to hit the fan here at a meeting in Seattle that fall. I can still vividly remember that meeting, with Jim Larson in charge. His right-hand person was Shirley Clark, and both of them were uneasy with any discussions about sewage and optical loss, but particularly sewage. I can understand the uneasiness about sewage. Probably a 1,000 people, park visitors and staff, were stricken with waterborne illnesses at Crater Lake in 1975. It was initially attributed to food poisoning, but turned out to be sewage in the park’s water supply.

Munson Spring.

Yes, Munson Spring. I wasn’t there at the time but it seemed like it was during the summer of ’75. I was in Portland at the time and remember listening to this on the radio. I believe it closed the park. They stationed National Guard troops at the entry to insure that no one would get in until they found the source of the problem. A lot of people were stricken up there, but didn’t really get ill until after spending a day there and then leaving. They [The Center for Disease Control] estimated that there were a thousand cases based on research afterward. There were a lot of lawsuits and the Park Service staff was chastised, with more than a few people transferred out of the park. Their careers were probably damaged as a result. So the word sewage at Crater Lake was really dynamite.

I sensed from Jim Larson and Shirley Clark and other Park Service people in the upper echelons that they were involved in damage control. Either that or they had a siege mentality. There was an unwillingness to admit that there was a problem is what I observed. In fact there was outright denial. There was a lot of skepticism expressed in the early meetings since a good scientist is always skeptical of any kind of conclusion or finding at first. Unless you have a sufficient pile of data to back your statement, you should be skeptical of that claim. Yet, no one was willing to take action to see if it were true.

The regional office in Seattle brought a guy named James Quinlan from the Kentucky caves, I don’t know what that park is called (25). He was an outstanding geologist with a specialty in ground water studies. He came to one of our meetings, and then spent some time at Crater reviewing the studies. He recommended to the Park Service that they introduce an organic tracer that you could detect. It doesn’t create a color in the water, since it’s invisible, yet it could be detected as an organic compound. He said we should do that just to see if there is leakage from the septic system. I agreed, and said if there is leakage then we need to know what affect it might be having on the lake. I also suggested that we’re seeing a change in optical properties, but we didn’t have sufficient historical data to determine if the measurements I made in ’78, ’79, ’80, and ’81 were indicative of natural conditions. Are they cyclic conditions or are they indicative of a change caused by some anthropogenic source like sewage? If we had a strong historical data base we could compare these recent Secchi readings and other optical measurements with the historical data base to chart any trends. Is this an unprecedented change, or could it [the decreased Secchi readings] have occurred earlier? In any case, we lacked this historical database so we weren’t able to tell if these recent data are unusual or if they are typical of a cycle. We were hampered in making any evaluation.

I felt there were two levels of approach here. The first level was to introduce tracers and see if indeed septic wastes were reaching the lake. The next level was if we find that sewage is entering the lake, then we need to know what effect this is having on the lake’s biota. One way to do that is bioassays. I made some proposals how we could approach them. We could do both in situ and laboratory bioassays. The first is where we would take algae from the lake and incubate them directly in situ. The second involves taking them to a laboratory and do the so-called PAAP test, that is the Provisional Algal Assay Procedure that EPA uses. None of this was done. The Park Service refused to carry out Quinlan’s recommendation to use a tracer and they didn’t want anything to do with my recommendation for bioassays to see if the algae were growing in response to this septic leakage.

Gradually I found myself arguing with people from the Park Service and at the meetings, and I became an adversary. I was an unwelcome participant and thought of as a non-team player. It got to the point where we really weren’t speaking to each other, in particular Jim Larson and Shirley Clark. Things were said and I realized my position with Park Service was very shaky. But I was determined not to let this be swept under the rug, even if it meant that I wouldn’t be hired as a full time limnologist. I’m not saying this to glorify myself, but for me it was a Bonsai attack and I was going to carry it through and make the Park Service address this issue of sewage – – even if it meant that I lose my job with them and maybe even with the Corps. This subsequently came to pass because Bob Benton, the superintendent who followed Jim Rouse, wrote a letter in 1987 to my employer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He complained about my activism and more or less suggested that the Corps fire me for cheating them by using their time to pursue my issues [at Crater Lake]. I had to respond with a letter to defend myself and I talked to my supervisor about this. Fortunately the Corps supported me, and felt that there was no wrongdoing on my part at all. I wrote a letter to the Director of the National Park Service pointing out that this superintendent was trying to get my scalp. I never received a response from the Director and was really angry (26). I felt that they were trying to get rid of me, so I continued to harass them for years until they finally removed the septic leach field system off the rim and began piping it down the hill in 1991 (27). At that point I finally let up then on my attacks.

Back to this letter where I’m being dismissed in the fall of ’84. I got a call from Jim Larson one day and he said Doug we’re going to create this new job, limnologist, and I thought you’d be interested. You’ve always said this is something you promoted, not yourself necessarily, but you’ve promoted the idea of a permanent limnologist at Crater Lake and we think the time has come.

Was that after the legislation?

Yes, it was in 1984. He said we finally have the money, so send your application to us. I was thrilled to say the least, since this is what I had dreamed about. I submitted all the forms, and believed I was qualified because I had worked there [Crater Lake] at least 14 summers. 1 knew the lake, knew a lot of the people and knew the problems. I had a Ph.D. and about 50 publications in journals. I thought I was highly qualified. It was in August, ’84 up there when I remember Mark Forbes and I went to breakfast [at the cafeteria]. He said, “Doug, I want to talk to you after we’re done here.” I said okay so we went out and we sat on the little rock wall overlooking the lake. He said, “I hate to tell you this, but you were passed over for this job.” I was shocked, but then again, I wasn’t shocked. I was pretty sad about it and sitting here thinking about it, I get a little tear in my eye. He said that they hired a guy who was inside the Park Service. I asked who’s that, and he said Gary Larson at the Smoky Mountains – – I think that’s where he was at the time. Anyway, he said they hired him. I asked whether Gary had ever worked at Crater Lake? No, he’s never worked here. Is he a limnologist? Well no, he’s an aquatic ecologist. That’s all right. Has he ever published a paper about Crater Lake? No, but they prefer to have someone within the Park Service. I said I’m not going to protest. I accepted it and the following summer in ’85, I worked the summer to make the transition, setting things up for Gary and continuing my work. I worked with a guy named Cliff Dahrn who’s now a full professor in the biology department at the University of New Mexico during the summers of ’84 and ’85.

So you were down on the lake doing research?

My last summer of work there was in ’85, then Gary took over. In ’86 I made one field trip with Gary down there to compare our photometers. Gary bought a new photometer, and I still had the one I had been using for several years. We thought let’s compare these

to see how they read subsurface light. I remember we taped the two sea cells together so that they would go down exactly the same. That was my last field trip and I didn’t go back until the summer of ’95 with some friends from Austria.

How did the AAAS article come about?

I kept up my activism, and every chance I got I would write an editorial in the paper, maybe three or four of them. They had a meeting [of the AAAS] in Corvallis in ’89 and we were all asked to give papers (28). I went down and gave a paper and I don’t think anybody really rebutted my views at the meeting. Perhaps this was because I was only suggesting that this was happening. I never claimed that any decline of optical properties was happening for a fact. All I said was that we have data suggesting that the optical properties have changed. We also have data from one of these springs, in fact, several of these springs under the lodge showing them to be enriched with nitrates — which is a common component of sewage (29). Nitrates do not adhere to soil particles like phosphorous does. It’s very mobile through soils. But this is still hypothetical. I made that clear. When it came time to publish the papers in the proceedings of the symposium, the Park Service tried to keep my paper out of it. Fortunately, the senior editor, Ellen Drake, who’s an oceanographer at OSU, publicly stated that there would be no censorship of this book. The Park Service argued vehemently against including my paper, but she said well, it stays. For better or worse my paper got published (30). The Park Service tried to censor it and that’s not in the spirit of good science. I think you need to look at all facets of this argument. You need to look at those who are your adversaries as well as advocates, the team players. My paper got published. Then in 1992, on the park’s 9oth anniversary, I attended a symposium at Southern Oregon State College and gave another paper (31). There were a couple of naysayers in the audience who challenged me, but 1 just reiterated my usual position about this being a possibility. By that time, of course, the park had connected their sewer line to the cafeteria [in 19911 and were piping the sewage to the Munson Valley Lagoons. In about ’93 or ’94 the new Superintendent, David Morris, denied that sewage ever reached the lake. This was even published in the newspaper (32). He just said it never happened, which was infuriating to me, because in 1987 the Park Service made a statement that there was a good possibility that sewage was going in the lake (in an environmental impact document they were doing for improvements in Rim Village) (33). So it seems like I sort of became “an enemy of the people.” Who wrote that?

Sounds like Ibsen’s – “An Enemy of the People.”

Yes, An Enemy of the People. The guy finds the contaminated well water or something in the town and it threatens the town’s economic well-being. OK. Back to your questions here, Steve. “Did you initiate contact with Denny Smith’s office?” No, I never initiated any contact.

That’s an important point.

Yes. I was mum about this for four years. I never said a word to anyone. I could have gone to the Oregonian and they would have said hey, we’ll write a story. I could have blown the whistle on this a lot sooner, but I was cautious because I wasn’t sure my data was any good. I needed to verify it and wanted to collect more data. After four years, my information got leaked to Denny Smith. It was leaked to Denny Smith by someone in the Park Service but who, I don’t know.

“Were OSU researchers involved with studies on the lake between ’78 and ’82 [prior to the mandated 10 year study]?” Yes, I mentioned Cliff Dahm in particular. Cliff at that time was a research professor at OSU. He didn’t have tenure, he didn’t have a [tenure track] appointment (34). He was sort of between his doctoral work and finding a permanent job as a college professor. He finally went to the University of New Mexico around ’83 or ’84. He helped me a lot down there, but was the only person in that period from OSU. Cliff and I were at Spirit Lake, too (35).

So it was a pretty small time effort in those first couple of years of the 10-year report.

Yes.

“Why was the length of time 10 years chosen?” I don’t know.

There were a lot of government studies that tended to be 10 years in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

All I remember was that his legislation just said 10 years.

How did Stan Geiger become involved with phytoplankton studies?

I’d like to elaborate a little on that. I became acquainted with Stan in 1974 when I worked at Oregon DEQ. Stan has a Bachelors Degree in biology from some little school in Missouri, and then decided to go to Yale Divinity School. He became a minister – Episcopalian, I think and served at a church in St. Louis for 12 years. He got his Masters of Divinity at Yale. Stan decided to leave the ministry and he went to Oregon State. He worked under Harry Phinney and got his masters in botany. Harry told Stan one time, if you’re looking for work, go see Doug Larson in Portland at DEQ. Well, Stan had a job with Beak Consultants, which is a Canadian consulting firm here in Portland. They’re based in Quebec, but they had a regional office here and Stan worked for them. He came to my office at DEQ looking for jobs that Beak could do and that’s how I met him in 1974. Stan was an outstanding phytoplankton guy and a great taxonomist.

After I started working at Crater, I had all these samples and every year they were building up. I maybe had 1,000 samples collected in my 6 or 7 years down there. I asked Stan to help with identification. I also needed someone who had a spectrophotometer so I can do chlorophyll analysis. Stan agreed to participate and to do all the work for nothing, pro bono. I even got to use Beak’s laboratory. At that time I wasn’t married so I had a lot of free time, I would go to his lab every Tuesday night for four years and work till sometimes midnight. Stan would help me with identification, though he wouldn’t always be there. I did all the counting of algae so I could quantify the collections. Over a four or five-year period, Stan identified more than 100 species. This was all new work. Stan also arranged for us to get some SEM work done with a grant from the Mazamas (36). So we got a lot of SEM microphotographs. Through this effort with Stan’s leadership and help we were able to quantify all these samples and identify all the species. I did all my chlorophylls there. I even had Stan put together a proposal for phytoplankton work. That was really neat, some things he could do with SEM, but the Park Service rejected that. I think it was in the ’82 report. It was a recommendation for work. So Stan was really important in that and we eventually published our work in a Mazama publication (37).

How did your objections to the way research was being conducted at Crater Lake change your relationship with colleagues?

I don’t think I ever objected to the way they did their research. I was always insistent on the need to explore the sewage problem and the clarity question. I felt that we needed to address these questions up front. We needed to do some tracer studies, bioassays which unfortunately were never done. If indeed sewage was getting into the lake, then we needed to assess its effect. One way to make this determination is through EPA’s provisional algal assay procedure or -in -sit u bioassays with C-14. I knew how to do that work, but none of it was ever done. When I had a chance to comment on their lo-year report, I felt that they had done a great job of monitoring and developing a primary data base for historical comparison. They had been doing some excellent research through [Bob] Collier, [Jack] Dymond and some other researchers. However, I felt that they were neglecting the sewage issue. It was sort of being swept under the rug, even during the 10 year research program. I don’t think the word sewage came up in the 10-year study, so I was very critical of the report. On one hand, I supported the things being done. I even said you need a 100-year effort [in monitoring]. It routinely should be done as part of park management, there should be no question. You should have money for lake monitoring every year. You need to ensure that the lake is not diminishing in quality, and the way you do that is to monitor. There are a lot of interesting research questions that need to be addressed. As a result of my comments on the ten-year study, I received a blistering letter from Dave McIntire who was one of the authors. He felt personally insulted and felt that I was way out of line in criticizing the report. I don’t even want to read you the letter because it’s almost worthy of a lawsuit for defamation of character. Dave had always been a good friend of mine and suddenly he turns on me because I’m being critical of the park for not addressing the sewage issue. He viewed my activism as an ego trip, in that I had made up my mind that sewage was going in the lake, that I was angry and that my ego was damaged. I don’t know where he came up with all this stuff, but in any case, I was somewhat hurt by the letter because I feel that the realm of science is argument, debate, and disagreement. That’s how we advance. You don’t advance with consensus – – there’s no such thing as consensus in science. I’ll bet you that 90 percent of the papers that appear in journals today are going to be shown to have been incorrect, if not totally incorrect. But that’s how science advances. The arena of science is disagreement, it’s battling, until you come out with the right answer. You can’t have a bunch of nice guys saying we all agree. As for changing a relationship with a colleague, my relationship with Dave McIntire was forever dashed.. I’ve never heard from him since and never replied to the letter. I was really hurt by it.

Did your article that appeared in the 1990 AAAS volume appear as an alternative view?

No, it was not like Joe LeFleur’s paper which was an alternative view about hydrothermal venting. Mine was simply a paper suggesting possible change. I used data that I had gathered to suggest rather than conclude that sewage had contaminated the lake, and it might explain why the lake’s optical properties had diminished.

How familiar was Goldman with the conditions at Crater Lake relative to his work at Tahoe?

Well, interestingly enough, Goldman had done some work at Crater with Tyler and Smith. Their paper came out in 1973 (38). I don’t know if he went up to Crater but someone did some work and he looked at the data. They compared Tahoe and Crater. If you look at the 1990 AAAS volume, Goldman’s paper is the last one (39). I felt he gave credence to my paper. In other words, Goldman said he had seen the same thing happen at Tahoe. It was a lake that was supposedly immune to eutrophication, yet they had documented a substantial decrease in Secchi disk readings over a 30-year period, and indeed Lake Tahoe was becoming more productive. That lake is much larger in volume than Crater; however, rivers flow into it and there is intensive development at the fringes. It’s far more susceptible and far more exposed to human activities than Crater Lake. If you read Goldman’s paper, he is somewhat supportive of my idea that these lakes are sensitive to even slight nutrient increases because the organisms that inhabit these lakes are adapted for very low nutrient conditions; otherwise they wouldn’t be there. If you add even a miniscule amount of nutrient, that may be enough to stimulate substantial growth.

Was there evidence of that happening at Waldo?

That’s right. Goldman published a paper in the 1960’s about that very thing. It is where I got my idea about energy efficiency for my doctoral thesis (40). Goldman may have gotten this idea from someone else, but in lakes like Crater Lake and Waldo Lake, the phytoplankton species are generally small-bodied organisms. They are highly efficient at taking up nutrients. In other words they devote most of their entire mass to surface area in order to maximize nutrient uptake because the nutrients are so scarce. Concentrations of phytoplankton are relatively low and if you look at the phytoplankton in Crater Lake and in Waldo Lake, they generally are small-bodied organisms with a high surface area to volume ratio to maximize nutrient uptake. This is an adaptation.

As lakes become more eutrophic, more nutrient rich, the organisms become more wasteful because nutrients are readily available. They don’t have to be as highly efficient in obtaining them because nutrients are abundant. You generally find more blue-green algae in eutrophic lakes like Klamath, large bodied organisms whose energy efficiency or nutrient uptake efficiency is less. In oligotrophic lakes, the phytoplankton are sensitive to slight nutrient increases, as you would expect. They’re going to respond to these slight nutrient increases even though the amount of nutrients that went in to the lake were infinitesimally small and probably insignificant in terms of volume. Yet this amount of nutrient may have been sufficiently large to stimulate a significant response from the algae. I remember reading about prisoners of war from the Pacific after World War 11. Men who had been starved came back weighing 80 – 90 pounds. It didn’t take but a matter of weeks and they were back to their normal weight. That probably has nothing to do with phytoplankton, but illustrates that these organisms are really nutrient starved. Given even a slight increase in nutrients, they may really take off. That is what I suggested at Crater Lake and for other lakes like it. Managers who are responsible for the lakes may assume that small, incremental increases in nutrients are insignificant and really aren’t sufficient to change or add to the lake’s eutrophication rate, but that’s wrong. Goldman had mentioned this in an earlier paper about how these organisms are highly adapted for lower nutrient conditions but could have a significant increase in productivity resulting from a seemingly insignificant increase in nutrient availability. That’s my argument–that these lakes can’t be treated like any lake as far as their potential to become more eutrophic.

By the same token, fish could have a negative long-term effect in terms of adding nutrients to the lake.

Absolutely. This is the case in Waldo Lake, though it has never been proved. They’ve banned fish stocking as of 1990 in Waldo. One of the arguments, though I’m not sure I agree with it, is that the fish were adding nutrients through defecation. There’s another problem with fish stocking in Waldo that’s not related to their nutrient loading. Anyway, next question.

What might explain the relatively steady level of nitrates in spring 42 some 9 years after the septic leach field was decommissioned?

That’s a good question. I don’t know. We estimated the volume of sewage based on a formula that was used in California. I estimated that about 16 million gallons of liquid sewage per year. Now we could be on the conservative side and cut that in half and say 8 million gallons. Even that is a substantial amount, since 8 million gallons fills 800 railroad tank cars to carry that amount of liquid waste. That’s a lot of liquid waste going into this septic system that’s perched 200 meters above the lake, and only about 200 meters back from the lake in highly porous soils. As I was saying earlier, nitrate is very mobile in soil so you would expect the nitrate to continue to penetrate through the soil profile and be carried down into groundwater, an aquifer which perhaps finds its way to the lake.

As I understand it, the leach field was first placed there after World War I1 when the visitation rate rose rapidly. I think it was originally developed to accommodate about 200,000 people each summer. We have three times more people than that visiting the park each summer now (41). I really can’t explain why the nitrates have remained fairly high over these years. I have no explanation unless the septic system has continued to leach out nitrates and it may do this for some time. I’ve always said that if I’m proved wrong I will certainly admit that I was wrong and accept it. I’m definitely interested in the truth here, and it is possible that sewage was never going into the lake. It was never proved, but neither was it proved as to the effect this sewage might be having on the lake. No one ever proved that sewage was having an inconsequential effect, either.

Is clarity as big an issue now given several world record Secchi disk readings since ’83 as it was 20 years ago?

Coincidentally, it turns out that about the time the sewage pipeline was installed the Secchi disk readings began to increase. I’m not saying, however, that there’s a correlation here, still a lot of unknowns and uncertainty. I’ve never said that there was a definite link between sewage contamination and the lake’s optical properties, but in most lakes there definitely is a link. Anytime the Secchi disk visibility diminishes one always suspects the lake is being contaminated with sewage. Again, I don’t know why nitrates in Spring 42 haven’t diminished in concentration. There are a lot of unknowns in this system but fortunately the clarity has returned to Crater Lake, and indeed some of the readings they’re getting now are 40 or 41 meters. As far as I know 41 meters with the small disk is better than anything that they’ve ever gotten at Crater.

Should the monitoring program continue?

We talked about this at lunch Steve. My personal opinion is that Crater Lake National Park should have a lake monitoring research program that is base funded every year. It should be done routinely without any question as to whether it is effective or necessary. This would provide some way of knowing if the lake is indeed deteriorating due to some natural or anthoprogenic cause. I think it should be done because future investigators will benefit from having a long term and thorough historical basis with which to compare their data. This was something we never had when hypothesizing that the lake had changed. If we had had this record, maybe this whole issue wouldn’t have happened. But we never had that, so the program is invaluable and it should be continued. I think there should also be an emphasis on research where a hypothesis can be tested. That gives us a better understanding of the lake’s various processes and how it might respond to increased use and impacts from not only visitors but other external impacts, like whatever goes on in the general region down there. Increased traffic and increased industrialization and increased development in that whole area that could have an impact on the lake.

Should it [the monitoring program] be restructured?

I’m not sure. The monitoring should be done as it has been done over the last 15 or so years. There should be continuity and no big data gaps. Protocol in collecting their data and the techniques they use should be consistent. There should be periodic attempts to take the data and analyze it so that we’re not just piling up data. The data should be used in some way. They still do the annual reports, right?

Yes.

I don’t know how much of that analyses is in the annual reports, or if they’re just progress reports on what is being done. I don’t know. There should be accountability because a lot of money is being spent, a half million each year I suppose (42). I think there should be more frequent reports that could be done, possibly with the annual report, where the data gathered over the previous year is analyzed and findings presented. It might build on previous reports so that you could begin to see what’s happening through time with all these measurements.

Could there be more frequent peer review (43)?

Yes. Peer review was something I emphasized when I was setting up the program. I thought it was absolutely essential that we have people outside the Park Service — outstanding scientists, independent researchers, maybe a half dozen or so, who would be hired to come and evaluate our program as well as the methods used. They would make recommendations on our program in order to make it better, as well as to analyze the data with us, or look at our conclusions and determine if what we’re finding is really scientifically sound. When you submit a paper to a journal it goes through peer review to see if it’s scientifically sound. We need that at Crater Lake. It was used early in the program because you needed to have outside expertise to evaluate the data, and any conclusions drawn from it.

I think it’s probably less frequent now.

It should be done yearly.

Yearly?

Yes, yearly. Sometime maybe in the fall, at the end of your intensive monitoring period like June through October, sit down with the data that was collected over the previous year. Bring in your experts, meet at OSU or somewhere that’s convenient. I don’t see this as being a big cost. If nothing else, you’re tossing ideas around. Where have we been and where are we going? I think these are things that need to be discussed; otherwise the program gets mired down in bureaucracy and it becomes sort of an in-house thing and it loses its direction. The program [without frequent peer review] could become tainted with politics and begin to lose its scientific integrity. The only way you can have scientific integrity is if you open it up to outside, independent observers and peer reviewers who can criticize, redirect if necessary, and add to what might be needed to make a better program. You may otherwise end up with a lot of data that’s useless or be gathering a lot of data that you don’t need, and may be missing things that need to be investigated. Independent, outside review really helps to keep a program on track. One of my first recommendations years and years ago was to have outside, independent peer review.

I don’t know what else I can say, that kind of brings us to the end. You mentioned my other work at Bull Run, Spirit Lake (44). I’d be happy to talk about those things.

The other work is interesting, but it doesn’t necessarily touch on Crater Lake except for maybe Waldo a little bit.

I think I’ve just about covered my involvement in the Crater Lake story as far as going back to when I first started there in ’67 and to the present. I do have a few concluding remarks, and I’ll try not to repeat what I’ve said, but I do have some comments to bring this to an end. I may have said some of these things earlier, but I’d like to reiterate them for emphasis.

One is that I was really quite disappointed in the response I got from the Park Service after I notified them that sewage may be a problem. As you and I discussed at lunch, my impression was that the Park Service would be quite receptive to any information that helped it to better manage the park. That’s why they had me working down there to do research and alert them to potential problems. I was quite disappointed, if not surprised, at the response I received.

Another unfortunate experience was my perception that the Park Service was trying to discredit my work. That’s my own impression, I don’t have any proof that they were doing this. I just had that feeling at meetings and wherever I went to present papers. Proving someone wrong is OK, but in doing so you don’t want to discredit the person. To suggest that I am not qualified to make those statements, or to state that my work lacked certain integrity, amounted to someone discrediting my work. It was disturbing because to me, that is not something that good scientists do in debating an issue, they don’t try to discredit their opponent. The game is to argue one side or the other using information either side has generated. Maybe no one will be able to conclude anything, but free debate involves this give and take. To me the Park Service’s attitude was a lack of respect [for my work] and it just embittered me further. I’ve talked with people who have had this experience at other national parks. I find it hard to understand why certain people in the Park Service resisted this so much. I’ve speculated about the possibility that people at the park and in the regional office had been involved in the sewage episode of 1975. No one wanted any mention of sewage, so it was treated with a lot of alarm. There was a reluctance to discuss it, or even suggest that it was happening.

Have you had any indication of a thawing in relations over the past few years?

No, not after my conflict with Bob Benton in ’87. As I mentioned earlier, he was on a fishing expedition and suggested that the Corps should take disciplinary action against me. Of course, I wrote a letter and talked with the news media about this. They wrote a story that put Benton in a pretty bad light (45). After that I wrote a couple of editorials, but never heard anything [from the NPS]. I went to a meeting at SOSC in ’92, got some harassment from the audience, but nothing really substantial. The letter from Dave McIntire in ’93 was pretty harsh. I reviewed the 10-year study and then I wrote this lengthy letter laying out all of my criticisms. I sent copies to various people on a House committee, George Miller was the chairman (46). I sent him copies and what really got to McIntire was that I had distributed my letter. I wanted people to be aware that the Park Service had done an excellent job of monitoring the lake and collecting data, but in doing other kinds of research, they had neglected to address the sewage issue. I felt this was something that needed to be addressed, and more research should be aimed at the possible impacts of sewage at Crater Lake — if indeed sewage had gotten into the lake. There were these little skirmishes over the years, but I never felt that the Park Service made any attempt to let bygones be bygones. They never sent me a letter and thanked me for anything. I don’t expect thanks anymore than I would expect the Forest Service to congratulate me on my activism on Bull Run or at Waldo Lake. They’re never going to say I was right and they were wrong.

Two things were accomplished here. I was never proved right as far as sewage going into the lake or that sewage had an adverse affect on Crater Lake. That was never demonstrated. It’s still unknown and I guess that a lot of people believe that it was never a problem; even if sewage was going in the lake it was never a problem, there was more nitrogen being introduced with rainfall. People can believe what they want, I don’t care. I believe sewage was going into the lake and think that it was stimulating algae in the lake. All of that is, however, speculation. What really matters is that the Park Service now has a monitoring and research program that it did not have prior to 1983, and probably never would have had if this [the sewage hypothesis] had not happened. Number two: they took the sewage septic system off the rim whether sewage was getting in the lake or not. The septic leach field serving the cafeteria was no place for the sewage system. It should never have been put there in the first place. These things were accomplished and I feel good about that. I’m not expecting any acknowledgment or credit for that. I hope that the monitoring and research program goes on ad infinitum. The public can afford it, and the public should pay for it. It’s an essential part of park operations to monitor the lake and conduct research so that people better understand Crater Lake. A lot of information that’s gathered from the research can be imparted to the general public. It makes the public more knowledgeable about the lake, and it makes them more appreciative of it.

Mark paid you a compliment one time.

Mark?

Buktenica. He said that he has a job because of Doug Larson.

Oh. (laughter) This happened at Waldo Lake too. The Forest Service now has a million dollar program now to do research and improve toilets and so forth at Waldo. This is something they should have had 50 – 100 years ago. These are things that you would think should be protected at all costs. I don’t know a lot about it, but there was research about the trees and elk in the park (47). I think this is good, but we have elk at Mount St. Helens and we have similar tree species elsewhere. We only have one Crater Lake and research about it can’t be neglected.

A lot of those studies were done because the CPSU were set up to do them (48). They could do the forestry work inexpensively.

I’m not saying that it was bad decision making to pursue those kinds of studies because they’re essential, too. I was saying that you have to remember that there’s one thing about Crater Lake that’s unique I believe, and that’s the lake. I don’t know about the wildlife or plants there. I don’t think there are any organisms in the lake that might be classed as unique.

How about a water mite?

There might be some invertebrates in there; I can think of two species of zooplankton. Some of those rotifers might be unique but I don’t know. The lake in its entirety is unique, even though its inhabitants aren’t necessarily endemic. The lake is, as Gary Larson would say, holistically a unique system.

It makes for one of the better ecosystem studies because you’ve got that enclosed basin under very interesting geological circumstances.

I was down at a conference in Reno in December and had lunch with Charles Goldman. I’m not a close friend, but we just happened to meet and he wanted to have lunch. We talked about Crater Lake and he’s of the opinion, as I am, that the best defense is a good offense. If you’re going to defend a lake you need to get on the offense and pursue research that will help you better understand the lake. Not only its characteristics but susceptibility to impacts.

As far as my involvement with Crater Lake, the [Oregon Historical] Quarterly article was closure. This [oral history interview] also helps me to close the book on it. I’m hoping that you will talk with the editor, Marianne [Keddington-Lang] at the Quarterly about a special issue because I think she’s very much interested. I think it would be really a nice thing to do for the park’s centennial.

I’ll talk to her about the subject and see if she’s interested.

Yes. I was thinking you might have categories [in the special issue] that you might pursue. Let’s say you would one category called science at Crater Lake which would incorporate not just research on the lake, but the stuff by geologists and foresters or whoever has done research there. There must be a lot of research.

There has been.

Then there might be a section on management. I’m sure that its scope or direction has changed over the years. It might even be interesting to review the different superintendents in regards to their management emphasis.

We have fairly decent records. That is one nice thing about Crater Lake. There are always gaps, but other parks are a lot worse off than we are.

Notes

1 This took place in the wake of massive Federal funding for science education and research after the Russians succeeded in placing a satellite called Sputnik into orbit.

2 In the Willamette National Forest.

3 In the Willamette National Forest and Honeyman State Park, respectively.

4 Nutrient-poor.

5 Located in northeastern Oregon.

6 The Nixon Administration preferred to slash funding for government programs rather than increase taxes in order to pay for an increasingly unpopular war.

7 Coastal lakes located in Lincoln, Lane, and Douglas counties.

8 Houses built under the FHA 235 program were usually inexpensive tract homes that qualified for federally-guaranteed low interest loans.

9 Larson, Temperature, Transparency, and Phytoplankton Productivity in Crater Lake, Oregon, “Limnology and Oceanography 17:3 (1972), pp. 4 10-4 17.

10 Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

11 H.V. Kibby, J.R. Donaldson, and C.E. Bond, “Temperature and Current Observations in Crater Lake, Oregon, “Limnology and Oceanography 13:2 (1968), pp 363-366.

12 Kenneth N. Phillips and A.S. Van Denburgh, Hydrology of Crater, East and Davis Lakes, Oregon, USGS Water Supply Paper 1859-E. Washington, DC: GPO, 1968.

l3 Near the Rim Campground, at the site of the concessionaire’s dormitory.

14 Located east of LaPine, Oregon in Newberry Crater.

15 Dan Sholly, at the time Chief of Interpretation and Resource Management.

16 Larson, “Probing the Depths of Crater Lake: A Century of Scientific Research,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 100:3 (Fall 1999), pp 288-3 19.

17 NPS Chief Scientist in the Washington office at that time.

18 Forbes was hired as the park’s first resource management specialist.

19 Chief Ranger from 1981 to 1983.

20 Supervisory Ranger (Interpretation) from 1978 to 1988.

21 Smith was Chief of Interpretation from 1979 to 198 1.

22 Smith won election as one of four congressmen from Oregon in 1980. He sponsored legislation in 1982 that mandated a ten year study of Crater Lake.

23 Surface elevation of Crater Lake is 6,178 feet.

24 Larson and Clark coordinated scientific studies from the Pacific Northwest Regional Office in Seattle.

25 Mammoth Caves National Park.

26 The director at that time was William Penn Mott.

27 Sewage from the Cafeteria went into septic galleries located near the top of Dutton Creek Trail until 1991, when installation ‘of a new sewer line connected the building to lagoons in Munson Valley. It has been hypothesized that there is a connection between this leach field and high nitrate levels in Spring 42, located below Rim Village on the inner caldera wall.

28 American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pacific Division.

29 These springs continue to show higher levels of nitrate than other springs inside the caldera almost a decade after abandonment of the septic leach field near Rim Village.

30 Larson; Clifford Dahm, and Stan Geiger, Lirnnological Response of Crater Lake to Possible Long-term Sewage Influx, in Ellen T. Drake, et a1 (eds), Crater Lake: An Ecosystem Study (San Francisco: Pacific Division of the AAAS, 1990), pp. 197 – 2 12.

31 Larson, “Limnology of Crater Lake, Oregon: Phytoplankton – Optical Interactions,” [abstract] Crater Lake National Park: Still Beautiful at 90, May 15 – 17, 1992, p. 6.

32 Lee Juillerat, “Crater Lake still clear: no changes forecast in new study,” Klamath Falls Herald and News, 5/6/93, pp 1 – 2.

33 USDI-NPS, Crater Lake National Park, Mazama Campground Rim Village Corridor, Supplement to the 1984 EA/DCP, October 1987, p. 18.

34 A position funded through research grants.

35 Larson did lirnnological studies for the Corps of Engineers on this lake near Mount St. Helens.

36 SEM is scanning electron microscope.

37 Geiger and Larson, “Crater Lake: Its Planktonic Algae,” Mazama (198 I), pp 54 – 59.

38 R. C. Smith, J. E. Taylor, and C. R. Goldman, “Optical Properties and Color of Lake Tahoe and Crater Lake,” Limnology and Oceanography 18:2 (March 1973), pp. 189-199.

39 Goldman, “Summary of Crater Lake Studies and Comparison with the Early Stages of Eutrophication of Lake Tahoe, ” in E.T. Drake, et a1 (eds.) Crater Lake: An Ecosystem Study (San Francisco: Pacific Division of the AAAS, 1990), pp 2 13 – 22 1.

40 Larson, On Reconciling Lake Classification With the Evolution of Four Oligotrophic Lakes in Oregon, Ph.D. thesis, Oregon State University, 1970.

41 Annual visitation has remained around 500,000 since the early 1980s.

42 The current annual budget is somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000.

43 Peer review of the lake program was conducted in 1984, 1989, 1993, and 2000.

44 The Portland watershed and Mount St. Helens, respectively. For an overview that relates limnological work at Mount St. Helens and Newberry Crater to Crater Lake, see Larson, “Volcanic Lakes of the Pacific Northwest,” Lakeline 18:3 (September 1998), pp 10-19.

45 Robert Sterling. “Letter to Corps angers scientist,” Medford Mail Tribune, December 11, 1987

46 Larson to Miller, 6/25/93; McIntyre to Larson 9120193; both in biographical (History) files, Crater Lake National Park.

47 Examples from the 1980s include James K. Agee and Terri L. Thomas, “Forest Restoration at Sun Creek” (1982) and Kurt Jenkins, et al., “Ecology of Elk Inhabitants Crater Lake National Park” (1988).

48 The Cooperative Park Studies Unit (s) were operating at Oregon State, Washington and Idaho by the early 1980s and usually involved graduate students doing studies related to a masters program under direction of faculty having NPS affiliation.

Other pages in this section
Crater Lake Centennial Celebration oral histories

Hartzog – Complete Interview (PDF)

Jon Jarvis

Albert Hackert and Otto Heckert

Hazel Frost

James Kezer

F. Owen Hoffman

Carroll Howe

Wayne R. Howe

Francis G. Lange

Lawrence Merriam C.

Marvin Nelson

Doug and Sadie Roach

James S. Rouse

John Salinas

Larry Smith

Earl Wall

Donald M. Spalding

Wendell Wood

John Lowry Dobson

O. W. Pete Foiles

Bruce W. Black

Emmett Blanchfield

Ted Arthur

Robert Benton

Howard Arant

John Eliot Allen

Obituary Kirk Horn, 1939-2019

Mabel Hedgpeth

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Crater Lake Institute – Enhancing the Visitors Experience

A free and in-depth library about Crater Lake National Park

Douglas Larson

Douglas Larson Oral History Interview