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.
