Emmett Blanchfield

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Emmett Blanchfield Oral History Interview

Interviewer: Stephen R. Mark, Crater Lake National Park Historian

Interview Location and Date: At Emmett Blanchfield’s residence in Sacramento, California, March 7, 1995

Transcription: Transcribed by Chris Prout, August 1997

Biographical Summary (from the interview introduction)

Blanchfield, Emmett U. Forestry technician 1930, ranger-naturalist 1931; later became landscape architect for the U.S. Forest Service and California State Parks.

I knew of Emmett Blanchfield’s work as long ago as 1988, while on a visit to Mount Hood that summer. An old address frustrated my efforts to contact him until a historian who worked on the Historic American Buildings Survey project for Timberline Lodge contacted me. She gave me some valuable insights about the connections between National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service projects in the 1930’s, along with Mr. Blanchfield’s current location, during the course of our telephone conversation. Less than three months later I made my way to Sacramento in conjunction with other business and spent the better part of a day interviewing him.

Much of the interview is captured by the following transcription, but we also had riveting conversations over dinner the previous evening and met again for breakfast.

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

taped interview; additional notes and correspondence in file along with manuscript concerning his work at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. Donated a number of photos take at CRLA in 193 1. Slide taken of him at the time of interview. Explanatory field notes which summarize these conversations, along with subsequent correspondence, are in the park’s history files.

To the reader:

I knew of Emmett Blanchfield’s work as long ago as 1988, while on a visit to Mount Hood that summer. An old address frustrated my efforts to contact him until a historian who worked on the Historic American Buildings Survey project for Timberline Lodge contacted me. She gave me some valuable insights about the connections between National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service projects in the 1930’s, along with Mr. Blanchfield’s current location, during the course of our telephone conversation. Less than three months later I made my way to Sacramento in conjunction with other business and spent the better part of a day interviewing him.

Much of the interview is captured by the following transcription, but we also had riveting conversations over dinner the previous evening and met again for breakfast. Explanatory field notes which summarize these conversations, along with subsequent correspondence, are in the park’s history files.

Stephen R. Mark

August 1997

Crater Lake National Park, National Park Service, Crater Lake, Oregon 97604

This is an oral history interview with Emmett Blanchfield in Sacramento on March 7th, 1995. I’ve got a number of questions for him. We’ll start with Section A about his educational background and seasonal work at Crater Lake.

Well, Steve, this is a great get-together. Discussing one of the favorite places on earth for me is Crater Lake! My first visit to Crater Lake was in 1930, my first job there. I don’t recall the year that I haven’t been back. One year during the war, I even flew over it with an Army plane. But other than that, and with my son having worked there six seasons, and the fact we’ve camped up there at Diamond Lake, why Crater Lake has been one of the key places in my life.

I think there probably are a number of reasons why I worked at Crater Lake and got started there working. Maybe it was because of where I grew up and the lifestyle I had up to college days. I was born in Oakland, California, in 1909. But shortly afterwards, because of the 1906 earthquake which preceded me, my father [a businessman] moved his publishing business to Los Angeles, where we had a lot of relatives. So I grew up in Los Angeles and Santa Monica. My family had a beach cottage just a half a block from the sand at Santa Monica. We had the Malibu Mountains and the Santa Monica Mountains all around us. So I kind of grew up between the beach and the Santa Monica Mountains, where I would not backpack – we had knapsacks in those days.

With the Scouts, we would camp up at Topanga Canyon and places. Then I had family that we involved in cattle ranches. So I grew up with a great love for things out of doors. I worked on a cattle ranch right on the edge of the Angeles National Forest. Then one of my uncles took out a special use permit in the Angeles National Forest in one of the major canyons. One of the family friends was a recreation staff officer for both the Angeles and the San Bernardino [national forests]. Another family friend was a chief forester for Los Angeles County and they were Yale graduates. That got me thinking about working out of doors. It also got me up to Oregon State College, where I started as a forester.

It was while I was in the School of Forestry that I decided I wanted to work in one of the national parks during my summer vacation. I wrote to several national parks. I remember writing to Yellowstone. The later director of the Park Service, Horace Albright, was Superintendent then at Yellowstone. And Horace Albright had jillions of applicants; I’m sure, for jobs. I applied to be a ranger. Of course, I was just a 19-year-old-kid. Horace Albright’s reply to me was that they needed mature men. That got me thinking I’d better get older fast. The next letter I wrote was to the superintendent at [Mount] Rainier National Park. They offered me a job in the Blister Rust Control Program. In the meantime, I had written to the superintendent at Crater Lake and I got a very encouraging letter from him. So I decided that I would go to work at Crater Lake, which was to my advantage because E.C Solinsky, the superintendent, gave my every opportunity to learn the ways of the National Park Service by putting me to work on different projects and with the older men rather than with the college bunch.

My first job in 1930 at Crater Lake put me to work on the Beetle Control Program. From there, after, I was a limber on the Beetle Control Program and then after that was over with, we’d turned all the bug trees to get the full advantage of the sun. I went to work with a crew of local men, older men. I was 21 then and the men were in their 50’s building the motorways. The first motorway built in the park was located by Chief Ranger Bill Godfrey. I remember going out with Bill Godfrey on a number of the locations for these motorways. I was telling Steve about the different ones. I went with Bill Godfrey on the motorway to Union Peak. There were motorways through the lodgepole on the south and the west and the north side of the rim. These motorways that I worked on were maintained by my son when he worked in the park for six seasons. He did the maintenance on them with his crews. They worked under the Chief Ranger Buck Evans.

The crews that I worked with had the trees, which had been established by the locators, ready for falling. All of these motorways were done on the manner of taking out the trees and rocks that were in the way. I got to the point where I got pretty expert at being able to locate and dig out rocks. There was no grading of these roads, except in very special cases. They just went through the country. Where we had to cross any streams or any boggy areas, we put in a log base so the vehicles wouldn’t got mired down in the water and in the mud. The associates with me were men that just treated me like their son’ cause, at my age, I was so much younger than they. I enjoyed Bill Godfrey coming out and meeting with us on the jobs. I used to work stripped to the waist, just in boots and blue jeans. Yes, they even had blue jeans in those days. No headgear. I would get pretty brown. Bill Godfrey would always come out and spot me and he’d say, “Well, how’s wild man Blanchfield today?” That’s they way he would greet me.

 How did the Park Service get water to fires in the park?

Well, one of the things Bill Godfrey did was to put me on fires control. In those days, you went on a fire and you just got up on the rim and looked around and spotted where it was off in the timber and you took off for it. You could be going to a fire at any time of the day or night. You might spend all night, but you didn’t get any extra pay for it. You just got paid for what you did in the daytime. I’d come back from working on a fire all night and have breakfast and go back to work on building the motorways. You were dedicated to your job. I think it’s far different, the way things are today. I think, at that day and age, government employees, oh, they do now, too, I know, but as far as paying you really every minute of the job, in those days, you had to have integrity that your job was 24 hours a day regardless and you got paid for eight.

Steve had asked about getting water to the fires in the park. The only fire I ever worked on at Crater Lake where water was used was one in my second season of ’31. There was a fire on the trail going up to the summit of Wizard Island. I can still remember that was parked a pumper down the trail. At that time, the trail went down to the lake from in front of the cafeteria. I got to the point I couldn’t handle my end of the pumper anymore. So George Christianson, who was an All-Coast tackle for the University of Oregon and, by the way, the whole football team at the University of Oregon worked in the park in ’30 and ’31. But George took over my job of handling my end of the pumper and thanks goodness because he was big enough and strong enough to accomplish that. We did get the pumper down and we got water on the lower end of that fire, but the rest of it took using shovels.

In those days, the Park Service didn’t have Pulaski tools or things of that nature. Also, getting to a fire in those days was just by visual observation of where the fire was. Later on, in my years in the Forest Service, it was pretty technical because you had the district fire dispatcher giving you all the data so you could use your compass and the date as to which road and which trail to take and what section line crossing you would mark on the trees. And then your points of the compass would lead you right in to where the fire was. That was called smoke chasing. I remember I used to teach smoke chasing at the fires camps in the Forest Service. We had a number o fires that came in usually late [in the] afternoons. The lightning storms would move in. It was usually at night that we had to got out on these fires. Then I’d go back the next day to be sure [it was out]. Only once or twice did we stay all night. We had to do that in the cases that the fire was up and moving. Of course, it would calm down during the night because of the higher humidity. We had a number of fires that would burn and smolder any you wouldn’t see any smoke. Then, all of a sudden when the humidity would be low, why, they’d flare up. So even maybe a week after a lightning storm, you’d have fires occurring that you didn’t know were there. In the Forest Service at that time, all the lookouts recorded every strike. So they were always on the lookout for all of these areas that they recorded with the azimuth circle and the fire finders. We did have the one lookout, up on Mt. Scott. It was in ’31, I believe, that they built the lookout up on the Watchman. It was in 1931 when I came back my second season at Crater Lake.

I want to back up a little bit. It was in that fall of ’30 that my good friend Bill Godfrey died in a snowstorm. He had been moved to Medford where they had the winter quarters, the superintendent and chief ranger and Erwin, the fiscal officer. Bill was a latter-day Daniel Boone. He would take off. One time he told me that he was going to take off and walk the whole boundary of Crater Lake National Park, and he did that all by himself. Down the canyons and back up again. He was quite a man. But Bill wanted to get into the park and I believe it was November of 1930 and one of my good friends I met at Crater Lake, Rudy Lueck, was in the park. He had been the caretaker for the lodge for a number of winter seasons, the only person in the park, actually, in the wintertime. Rudy was at Headquarters and Bill called and said that he was planning to come up from Medford through the west entrance. He wanted the snowplow to come down and meet him. But, the snowplow didn’t get down to where Bill was to meet it. So, Bill turned around and went all the way around and came in from the Fort Klamath entrance and the ideas were for the snowplow to meet him on that road. Well, the snowplow had gone on [to] the Medford entrance and didn’t get the message, I gather, to go to the Fort Klamath road. Undoubtedly, that’s why Bill was wearing light clothing because he expected to meet the snowplow with his car and then ride in the snowplow to Headquarters. Had he known he was going to get involved in going through the snow, he would have been better equipped. At any rate, he didn’t show up. So Rudy took off and I guess he must have snowshoed down toward Fort Klamath the next morning and there he saw Bill. Bill was by a tree, but he had walked all night and he worked a trench around that tree just to keep warm. By the time Rudy saw him, he was just on the verge of dying. Bill recognized Rudy and Rudy said that he called him. Bill died in his arms.

Some of the work that I did on the rim in 1931 as crew boss for the planting crew was right at the start of the trail down to the lake from in front of the cafeteria (1). The cafeteria was built at that time. We started under the direction of Merel Sager, the landscape architect. I should say Merel encouraged me to become a landscape architect back in 1930, when he and Tom Vint (2) told me that the future in the Park Service for landscape architects was better than if I had graduated in Forestry, which I was in at the time. Merel Sager was directing the work on the planting at the Rim area. It was started in 1930, along with the curbing to define the roadway and the parapet walls. We had an Italian stonemason (3) along with two All-Coast football tackles for the University of Oregon, George Christianson and Austin Coburn. And after the two of them left to go back to Eugene for football practice, they had to hire a couple of mules to take their place, because there wasn’t anybody big enough and strong enough to wrestle the rocks around. Those two fellows really got quite a ribbing from everybody that they were replaced by a couple of mules. At any rate, that work had progressed along the area in front of the cafeteria and at the head of the trail going down to the lake. Of course, that trail has long been closed because in the first place it was facing north and the snow never melted until well along in the summer. Then there were a lot of rock slides on it while the snow was melting. Later it was built over on the north rim where the sun and light would get to it (4).

We started our work on establishing sod and then plant material that was native to the area. I can remember a number of real fine mountain ash that we were able to find in the lower meadow areas below Headquarters. We had to go out and find meadow sod in places that the public were not going to see, because that was against park policy to do any changing of the landscape visible to the public. So that’s where we got all the sod and all the plants material. We were able to find mountain hemlock and in 1930, some nice-sized mountain hemlocks were boxed and then moved the next year so that the trees would suffer the least from transplanting. We moved those up by what we call a cherry picker that lifted them onto the truck (5). The area along the rim was a big dust bowl. There was no traffic control of any kind. People just drove here and there. I heard that, in a year or two before, one car had come up and its brakes had been pretty hot. While it was parked there, a lady had left one of the children in the car and she went back to get the child out of the car. A little while later, that car [with] the brakes cooling off went over the rim. So that was a very close call. They needed to have barriers like that. We got the sod going and the other vegetation. Merel Sager was supervising all this work. I can remember that there was some dead whitebark pine along the rim and we were going to cut those dead trees down. Merel came along and he said, “No, let’s leave them. That educates [visitors] about the elements here on the rim at Crater Lake.”  So we’d leave those dead whitebark pine and they did. They gave evidence to people that could understand this, the terrific weather that occurred up there on the rim.

I was up there, this is March 1995, and I started here in 1930, but I got into one of the toughest storms last October at Crater Lake. It was a real storm with lightning and thunder that just about blew me off the mountain. And here I was taking a friend of mine up there, a lady friend here in Sacramento, to see Crater Lake for the first time. I got her up there in one of the worst storms I had been in. I know there have been plenty of others that have been worse.

Well, during the time that I was on the planting crew, a man by the name of Lincoln Constance, who was on the staff at the University of California at Berkeley, was a ranger-naturalist. He had to leave in early August to go back to Cal. They started their term at that time of the year. The park-naturalist, Don Libby, asked me how’d I like to carry out the rest of the season as a ranger-naturalist to replace Lincoln Constance. So I said great, because that was what I wanted to do. Fortunately, one of the rangers from the year before had sold me his Park Service uniform because I fully expected at some place along the line I’d become a park ranger. That was one of my objectives. So I spent the rest of the season until mid-September as a ranger-naturalist and enjoyed very much guiding and taking the walks up to Garfield Peak, and down to the lake, and leading the automobile caravan around the rim. Construction on the new rim road had been started in 1930. Much of it was brand new (6). Also, at that time, they were just starting to build the road from Union Creek into Diamond Lake. So a lot of this area was just opening up to the public. I imagine that people driving the paved roads today just don’t understand that not too many years ago we were driving on wagon roads that were there when the park was brand new (7). One of my college professors in engineering at Oregon State was the engineer on the rim road that was built around 1912. He and I had quite a bit of discussion about Crater Lake. He was with the Corps of Engineers.

 What was his name?

Sam Dolan was my surveying professor at Oregon State.

During that period of time, in 1931, I met a lot of interesting people. One of them was the President of Bank of America. He founded the Bank of Italy in San Francisco (8). I met the editor of the Christian Science Monitor, and it was that summer of ’31 that E.C. Solinsky, the superintendent, introduced me to Horace Albright. He had just been made the new director of the Park Service after Stephen Mather died in 1930. I also met Dr. Merriam of the Carnegie Institution. Dr. Merriam, along with Professor Frank Waugh and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., was appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture to study public use at Mount Hood.

I remember that summer of ’31 that William Gladstone Steel, who was commissioner of Crater Lake National Park, was celebrating his birthday. I believe it was his 77th birthday. He was going to hike up to Garfield Peak and his daughter was quite concerned about it and was determined he wasn’t going to hike up alone. She went to Superintendent Solinsky and explained the situation. Solinsky asked me to accompany the Judge up to Garfield Peak. I had listened to the Judge give talks in the community Building (9) about his early days in Crater Lake. It was on that hike up to Garfield Peak that I got a lot of very interesting information about his early days. I didn’t realize at that time the extent of his connection to Mount Hood. I read about that later in Jack Grauer’s book that he was the founder of the Mazamas.

I knew that he had been born and reared on a farm in Kansas and that he came to Portland as a young man. He’d heard about this lost lake. He was bound and determined to find that lake.  The first white man to find it was Hillman, who the story went had heard about this blue lake up in the mountains. He was riding a mule and came upon the rim. He went to sleep on the mule, woke up and there was the lake right in front of him. Judge Steel had heard all these stories. So he went to Crater Lake.

At that time Crater Lake was a part of the public domain. It was open to any kind of activity. People could go up there and stake out a claim, a mining claim, or a timber claim. Of course, the timber wasn’t like the timber lower down in the mountains. But Crater Lake was really up there, what I would always call naked and unashamed. It had no means of support to protect it as a beautiful area. So Judge Steel then became very instrumental in going to Congress and he spent most of his own money going to Washington, D.C., to plead the case of protecting Crater Lake and making it into a national park, because there had been the precedent of Yellowstone. He had trouble sometimes getting home from Washington because he didn’t have much money. He spent his own money during all this activity of getting Congress to set it aside, particularly to get the President to set it aside. The first boundaries that were described, according to what he told me, were by township, ranger, and section. Somehow, it didn’t fully include Crater Lake. They found this out so the boundaries had to be changed to include all of Crater Lake.

Judge Steel was one of the finest men, and even though he was well along in his 70’s, he would contribute many an evening in the Community Building talking to the public about the early days. He was telling me one story of how he and several others in Medford decided they were going to plant fish in Crater Lake and how he had gotten together with the Oregon Fish Commission and gotten some fingerling Rainbow trout. They put the fingerlings in milk cans and then put them on a wagon. Several of his friends took off with him for Crater Lake. Each night they’d camp by a stream and replenish the water. Well, every time they crossed a stream they would replenish the water, so they’d replace the oxygen in the water so the trout could continue to survive. They finally made it, after about the third day, to the rim. They got up to the rim and he noticed some of the trout, the fingerlings, were starting to belly up. He said they took off right in the area where the Lodge is now. They went right down over the rim. How on earth could they have done that without falling? They got down to the lake and emptied the cans of fingerling trout, seeing that a number of them swan away. Well, of course, over the years those trout were just nothing but skin and bones until they were able to establish freshwater shrimp. Once the freshwater shrimp were introduced into the lake, the trout survived. I had many a good fishing trip in Crater Lake and caught those landlocked salmon. There were German brown trout also in the lake. One of our trial construction men was down at the dock at the foot of the trail from the south side. He saw a big German brown trout swimming underneath the dock. He found a knothole in the dock right above where the trout were and he dropped his line in there and he hooked right into a big German brown trout. But he couldn’t get it up because it wasn’t small enough to come through the knothole. Well, he stood there trying to figure out what to do and he finally just yanked his line and the trout came clear. But he learned where to fish after that.

The next year, ’32, I stayed and did some work in Los Angeles to make money to come back up to Oregon State. So I was able to finish out the fourth year of work in landscape architecture. It was during that time that I received a letter from Crater Lake and Don Libbey giving me the opportunity to accept the job as landscape architect at Crater Lake. I’d also written to Fred Cleator of the Forest Service and my professor insisted and encouraged me to accept the Forest Service job (10). This was because he felt that I’d have a better opportunity to get a wider range of experience in landscape design with the Forest Service because of its wider ranger of work – fishing resorts, lodges. And planning the ranger stations, things like that, plus all the campgrounds, and setting wilderness area boundaries and boundaries for all development. At that time, we had a new chief of recreation and lands for the Forest Service, Bob Marshall, a famous wilderness man. He set up policies that were particularly restrictive and land use classifications. As a landscape architect, it gave me the opportunity in the Forest Service to do a lot of what I call resource planning.  I found that working in the Forest Service was very joyful, a wonderful experience. But there was one thing about it, though. It was hell on my social life, because I worked on the regional foresters’ Travel Team. I was not home. I was out in the field most of the time. I’d get home from a field trip and I’d be there in the office for about a week and then I’d have to take off. And even when winter came, I would have to be out traveling in the winter sports areas. With the Timberline Lodge project, I spent the winters of ’35 and ’36 up there getting the date together to draw up my plan of development for the Timberline Lodge development. One of the projects I had on the Columbia River, I drew up the plan of development for the Eagle Creek Recreation Area. Because of my experience at Crater Lake, I had the knowledge of the building and design of the Sinnott Memorial Overlook. By the way, his niece, I mean Nick Sinnott, the Congressman, was the secretary to the regional forester. Because of my association with the Sinnott Memorial Overlook and having given one of the first lectures there, as a ranger-naturalist, I included in the plan for the Eagle Creek area, an overlook that would have the same kind of a function that the Sinnott Memorial Overlook building had as a place for the Forest Service to have recreation staff people give talks. It had a wonderful view up on the point overlooking the Columbia River Gorge and the backside of Bonneville Dam, the upriver side. All these Park Service experiences I had helped me a lot in the Forest Service. The planting that went on at Timberline Lodge was all based on my experience at Crater Lake, where I was able to get sod from an area we call Mud Lake, where later we would build a dam and create a lake. It’s called Trillium Lake now, but before it was flooded, I had the crews dig up all the sod and do exactly at Timberline what had been done on the rim at Crater Lake. That background of experience at Crater Lake helped me in that connection.

We’re in Section B, Landscape Architecture in the National Park Service and the U.S Forest Service.

Professor Peck used to tell student of landscape architecture at Oregon State about his consulting work with the U.S. Forest Service. He used to talk with me about it, because I had expressed my desire to do design projects while in college that would relate to the National Park Service. That’s when he explained to me that I had to go through the process of the design as set up by the curriculum and doing all the various types of design projects that were typical for landscape architects in studying the course. So I was able, though, in the School of Forestry as one of my projects in forest silviculture to plan a new entrance to the Peavy Arboretum at Corvallis (11). Then also I did a plan for one of the areas in the Arboretum as a day-use development. One time, I entered a ASAL design competition, which accredited schools of landscape architecture in the country, and won a second mention in the national design competition. Actually, I took fifth place among all the students in the country in this design competition. The design had to do with two adjoining country estates and integrating one new development into the old homestead development.

My earliest projects with the Forest Service as a landscape architect had to do with several of the campgrounds that were something like the Rim Village campground, where there was just nothing to it but a big dust bowl.  So many of those early developments were that way. I think we’ve learned from a forest pathologist by the name of E.P. Meinecke, who came up with the concept of control roads and parking, to minimize the impact on the forest trees. Many of the trees in the popular recreation areas were dying because of compaction through human use. But along with that in the Forest Service, I was able to get involved in the Timberline Trail around Mount Hood, which we started in 1933.

Then there were a number of special use permits like at Olallie Lake. The special use permit for a summer resort, boat docks, and the lake. That was one of my early projects. I was given the job of planning the brand new ranger station at Parkdale, Oregon, on the north side of Mount Hood. The ranger station, at that time, was in the home of the district ranger. This was a complete ranger station with new residences, office, truck and trail warehouse, fire warehouses, and things of that nature that made a complex of about 24 buildings. That had to be designed. I remember the ranger station at Parkdale, in particular, because it was alongside a fast flowing cold stream of water and there were a number of Indian huts that had been used for steam baths and firepits outside where they’d get the rocks hot and then put them in these little shelters. You could just barely crawl into them. Then they’d throw water. They’d put a lot of brush over them, throw water on these hot rocks, and they’d get all the steam. After they had gotten their skin all cleansed with this hot steam, they’d step out and about three feet away was this cold running stream that they’d dive in. If they didn’t have a heart attack, they would survive. That was an interesting project.

At the same time, I had a project up on Crater Rock on the south side of Mount Hood to build a climbers shelter up there. So I designed a shelter that was built at Crater Rock. I had to design the lookout on the summit of Mount Hood to determine if that could be rehabilitated and strengthened as another shelter for climbers. I remember, particularly, this trail on the old historic Barlow Road, coming over the mountain, and we made a bridal trail out of it. We had rustic signing incorporated in it. There were a number of very interesting projects while I was there at Zigzag Ranger Station. I even drew up a plan for the development for a local school. Where it is now, a major condominium and recreation area by the Welches golf course. Things like that would come into being. We did a lot of work with the local communities around the forest. I had some interesting field trips up to the Oak Grove Ranger Station by taking what we call a speeder car up through one of the city of Portland dams and electrical projects. But you’d take this little speeder car and you’d sit on the side of this speeder car and you’d go over these trestles and then all of a sudden you’re looking down between your knees and there was a drop off that looked like several hundred feet. You were up high on the trestle above the river. Then a lot of backcountry horseback trips. The Forest Service type of work was quite interesting in that there were a lot of backcountry campgrounds and hot springs like at Bagby Hot Springs. It was first about a 12-mile speeder trip and then a 17 mile horseback trip into the backcountry to Bagby Hot Springs, where we planned the development of campgrounds and the development of the hot springs itself. On the matter of shelters on the Timberline Trail, I had to come up with the design of stone shelters that would be on the 32-mile length of the trial. In scouting that out, it was quite interesting because I had to climb up over the Zigzag and then the Reed Glacier, and finally up to the Sandy Glacier. At one time, looking back where I had been, I was just right up above a yawing crevasse with about 2,000 foot drop off just below it. I didn’t realize that I was walking across terrain like that until I had gotten over into a glacial moraine on the Sandy Glacier.

There was a number of interesting experiences on those trips. We supervised crews at different levels from about the 1400-foot elevation on the mountain up to around 7000 feet, where we had these trail shelters built. Of course, on the summit of Mount Hood, you had to be quite a rock climber on some of the work. I didn’t expect to do that as a landscape architect. But I learned in the Forest Service you had to do a lot of things that weren’t customarily done by landscape architects. The work up at the Columbia Gorge was quite interesting because at that time the Bonneville Dam was under construction. We had a number of projects like at Eagle Creek where we acquired additional land, because the Corps of Engineers acquired property on both sides of the river for what they call their flow-line acquisition. The Forest Service was able to change property to acquire this land, like at Eagle Creek, where we had all this upper plateau country above the main Eagle Creek. [This was] where we developed day-use facilities and observation buildings and things of that nature.

I enjoyed being on the Mount Hood Forest tremendously and then in October, 1934, the regional forester assigned me to his office to open up and be the first regional landscape architect for the North Pacific Region (12). With that [job], I was able to return to Crater Lake through my trips to the Umpqua and the Rogue River national forests. So I reacquainted myself with Crater Lake. On one of the trips we had one of our junior staff foresters and his wife ride the Oregon Skyline Trail from Mount Hood to the Lake of the Woods below Crater Lake. So I drove down to Crater Lake with this junior forester’s car so that when he finished his ride down to Lake of the Woods, he’d have his car to come home. We had trucks to bring the horses and the pack animals back to the Mount Hood Forest. I was on the Umpqua and the Rogue River and the Siskiyou forests, and over to the Fremont and all of that southern Oregon country from east to west at least once and maybe a couple or three times each year. While I was at Crater Lake in 1930 and 1931, I made acquaintance with a man by the name of Ike Davidson. Ike Davidson was superintendent of construction, I believe at that time, and he did a lot of rock work (13). They were building, I believe the superintendent’s residence out of rock. Then one of the projects they were doing with rock, of course, was the parapet walls. Ike Davidson was hired to do the major rock work at Timberline Lodge, so I came into contact with him again.

We had lots to talk about because what was done at Crater Lake was being repeated at Timberline Lodge (14).  At that time, the WPA Director for Oregon, E.J. Griffith, wanted to have a name distinctive of Timberline Lodge for its style of architecture. The only other style that was being discussed was rustic and the like. So somebody on the staff came up with the term Cascadian. Well being of course in the Cascade Range, it was decided that maybe the nomenclature Cascadian would be identical and almost just strictly for Timberline Lodge. It’s been called that ever since (15). The landscaping at Timberline Lodge reflected what I learned at Crater Lake. My relationship at Crater Lake had a lot to do with what we did at Timberline Lodge. I find that very interesting. Of course, I can’t say much about the way it looks now. I don’t want to criticize, but Timberline Lodge was completed in 1937. When it was dedicated by the President, and all the site development work was finished, it never looked any better. It was really a fine alpine Cascadian project. But unfortunately, I have to say that I am not pleased with the way it looks today. The Lodge itself has been beautifully maintained on the inside. The outside, the terraces, which were meant for real nice public use, are nothing but places to store wood. They have done so many things that have been opposite of what I think should have been done, but originally it was done just right, just according to our plans and the direction of Regional Forester C.V. Buck.

Along come World War II and I was directed by the Corps of Engineers to report to the Portland District. I was no loan from the Forest Service to organize the camouflage planning program, which I did. I was all over Oregon and eastern Washington and into Idaho on different airbase projects and the like getting projects toned down so that, at least, on first strike, the Japanese might have to take a moment to figure out where they were. And the objective was to deter them from their first strike. After the Battle of Midway, why, I then found my work to be on a maintenance basis because we didn’t fear the invasion of the Japanese on the west coast even though we had been bombarded in several places by Japanese submarines. This included their lightweight autogiro planes they assembled on the subs, which dropped incendiary bombs on the southwestern coast that were deployed mainly to get people away from the shipyards and the aircraft factories to fight fire. But that never panned out because our Forest Service lookouts put out those fires.

I went back to the Forest Service at Mount Hood after the war. They needed someone up there to take over the Project Work Budget planning. I was there for six months and the only time I ever sat down was when I had dinner. I was in the field all over that million-and-a-half acre forest, either by trail or on horseback coming up with the Project Work Budget. This consisted of thumbnail sketch studies of projects, how they could be planned, and estimates of man hours of labor and project costs. I was then sent back to the regional office to take over again that Project Work Budget planning for the whole region.

In 1947, I decided that a continued career in the Park Service was to my benefit. I had been in contact with Red Hill and other park service people in connection with a coordinated Forest Service/National Park planning and development program. The Park Service, at that time, had the concept of trying to move the major use areas out of the park and letting the surrounding national forests take care of the camping, many of their administration buildings, and the communities for park personnel. So I was involved in that and then I found out there was this opening at Coulee Dam for a resident landscape architect. Along with an increase in a pay rating, why, I went up to Coulee Dam in March of ’47. That was a wonderful experience. I enjoyed doing the National Park Service type of master planning. Then it was a wonderful place to live, Coulee, and most of the people there were college-trained people. The work on designing the master plan from Coulee Dam up to the Canadian border was very challenging. Coulee Campgrounds and special areas for resorts, boating facilities, and things of that order. So I finished the master plan study for Coulee Dam and Newton Drury was the director. He approved it and, at that time, funds were running pretty low in the Federal Government. Many of the engineering personnel at Coulee Dam were being let go. I thought I saw the handwriting on the wall. So I elected to return to southern California, where I grew up, and opened up a private practice in landscape architecture, which I did for about six months.

I was so busy I didn’t have time to see my family, and it dawned on me that this wasn’t the career I wanted. And, lo and behold, I had a call from Dam Hull, who was the first chief landscape architect for the National Park Service. He had retired as the chief landscape architect for the California State Parks System and he told me the job was open and suggested that I take the next exam, which I did. Then I was asked to be the chief landscape architect for the California State Park System. It took several months before I moved up there [Sacramento] in August 1949. My family came up about six months later after we had sold our home. I had a career there from 1949 to when I retired in 1973. The first year I was the only landscape architect in the California State Park System.

That was an associate position. Then a senior position opened up in the Office of Architecture. There was only one other senior, so I took the exam for that and was appointed as the second senior landscape architect for the Office of Architecture, which was an entirely new facet of landscape design for me: mental hospitals, state prisons, office buildings, and I even had the National Guard armories. It was a major program because there was quite an appropriation for all these new state buildings. I was involved in it from the Oregon border down to the Mexican border.

Then Newton Drury had been assigned as the new director for the state park system after being the director of the National Park Service. I talked with him and he had a job for me to come over as the landscape architect in charge of master planning for the state parks, which I did. That was a very delightful job because I traveled throughout the state, and being my native state, I knew a lot of it. I’d take horseback trips in Mount San Jacinto and looked over the area where the tramway from Palm Springs goes up to the summit and selected generally the site where the upper terminals should be. We were in the Redwoods one week and down in the desert the next. A lot of projects were along the Colorado River. What I liked most were some of the major projects in the Sierra.

I got involved in the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley. The legislature appropriated funds for the Olympic development and as part of that several million of it came from state park funds. So we were involved, but the idea was I was to work with the Olympic Commission to determine what private lands we should acquire at Squaw Valley. Once we started talking with the people involved in the Olympic Commission planning, they told us to bug off. They had an Olympics to put on and they weren’t going to be worried about whether they bought any land for the future state park or not. So we had to take what we could get when the Olympics were over. All we took was a lot of litigation. We had everybody that was supposed to sue the Olympic Commission suing the state. Paulson and Cushing were the two principal landowners. Paulson was suing the state because of the fact that the meadow that he owned had been covered with sawdust and had to be used as the parking area during the Olympics, with the idea that the sawdust would freeze and form the base. Well, all the sawdust did was enhance the meadow sod, but the state had to pay out several million dollars for so-called deterioration for the meadow.  There were several instances where that happened.

I was then appointed to supervise all planning and development for the state parks from Yosemite to the Oregon boundary, including all the Sierra, all the Redwoods, the valley parks, and the like. We had projects at Lake Tahoe, where we did a great deal of land acquisition and development. We had substantial appropriations from the legislature to do both design and construction. So I was supervising all of that work.

After that work calmed down, we didn’t have quite the appropriations we had, why, my job with the state was to go in and review some of the major park projects and do general development. You might call it master planning of these parks, along with additional land acquisition studies. We were getting limited appropriations for land acquisition. At Castle Crags, for instance, up by Mount Shasta, I was working on an arrangement with the Forest Service where I’d set up lands to be acquired, private lands, and then we would work out a tri-party exchange whereby some of the land that the state would purchase would be exchanged with the Forest Service for National Forest land that we integral to the state park development.

We had a program up at Lake Tahoe at Sugar Pine Point where there was a private estate owned by one of the early banking families of Los Angeles. This was about a 2,000-acre project. I had made a study of the Lake Tahoe Basin for land areas to be acquired for state parks. Sugar Pine Point was one of them that had excellent lake frontage and went back up into the canyons with ample opportunities for campground development, things of that nature. We were working out a tri-party arrangement with the Forest Service and the private owners to acquire land next to Emerald Bay at Cascade Lake, but that project fell through. Originally the Forest Service was to acquire the property through a timber exchange. They would exchange timber rights with a private timber company and that private timber company, in turn, would buy the property from the private owner and then it would be turned over to the state for a park.  Well, we worked out a number of arrangements like that in the area on the north shore of the lake.

Lake Tahoe became one of the major project area studies, and the Grover Hot Springs area on the summit of the Sierra on the east side was another major project. We had quite a variety of beach projects along the coast. At the time we had the big tsunami (16) that wrecked a lot of Crescent City and came down along the Oregon Coast was when we were making a study under the direction of Pat Brown, who was governor, for a study of the redwoods. We made a study of what existed and what redwoods were being logged, and then what redwoods were in danger of being logged so we could set up a program for land acquisition. We were able to accomplish some of this. The timber companies were almost like enemy number one.  They didn’t want to even see us on their property. It was a hectic period of time. The National Park Service had just made a study prior to our study in connection with the National Geographic Society which provided funds for a study of the redwoods (17). I met with the landscape architects of the Park Service who were doing that study and it was a lot of help. I had a lot of help from them to come up with our study and our report to the director, which then went on to the governor and then on to the Legislature.

The state park planning system grew quite substantially from the time I entered in 1949 as the chief landscape architect until I retired in 1973. It went from me being the only landscape architect and I think we must have had about 75 at the time I finished. I was in the field and in the Sacramento headquarters office. Then, of course, as things often happen, feast and famine set in and they had to let a lot of the personnel go after I retired because the Legislature didn’t come up with the appropriations that were needed. They didn’t have enough taxpayers anteing up into the treasury. Well, the whole state system was having a difficult time with finances. The state grew to the point where they had so many different divisions and divisions within divisions that I used to say that it’s getting to the point where it’s like the doctor that’s so specialized that he specializes in the lower lobe of the left ear. That’s about the way the state was. They’d set up a landscape architect group that studies just National Guard armories and another group that would study signs. I explained to them I felt a landscape architect should be like the family doctor. He should be capable of doing everything and anything that came his way. But there were a lot of people that were looking for careers in some specialty and this is the way they felt they could get a career going. That went on for a while. There was one group that just specialized in studying the reservoirs.

There are still additions to the state park system, which is simple great. At one time, I proposed facetiously that the whole state of California ought to go back to being publicly owned and having to have justifications made for every kind of development. In particular, not allowing cities like Los Angeles to grow the way it’s growing because then it gets a preponderance of legislators who control Sacramento and whoever holds the most votes, of course, gets the most money. So many of these projects were going to southern California. But so far there’ve been good additions to the state park system, all to the public’s benefit. There was a change of three directors when I was in the division. At first, it was a division of beaches and parks. My former commanding colonel in the Army Engineers during the war became the chief after he retired from the Army Engineers. And his commanding general was General Hannum, who became the director of resources for California after he retired. The colonel in change of the Pacific Division had become what was called a beach erosion control engineer for the state park system. He’s the one that hired me. At that time, Governor Earl Warren was in office and they had the director of natural resources taking change of the state parks. This was General Hannum. From there, former supervisor Nelson, who had been Supervisor of the Tahoe National Forest, was made chief forester and became the director of natural resources. He supervised the state park system. Then Newton Drury came from, I guess, it was Chicago at that time to become our new chief of state parks (18). When he retired, Charlie De Turk, who had been director of parks in Indiana and then later became one of the chief planners for the Washington State Parks System, came to California as the new director of parks. When Charlie De Turk retired, we got a new director, Fred Jones. He eventually went to Washington with the change of administration when Pat Brown lost out to Ronald Reagan.

We had of course, as every political party changes, new personnel handling the different divisions. They became what personnel handing the different divisions. They became what were called secretaries under the governor.  They originally had about 12 divisions that all reported to the governor, but that was cut down to about a half a dozen. We were in the Resources Agency. When I retired in 1973, William Penn Mott was the director of state parks. Bill stayed on until several years after I had retired and then he went to Washington as the director of the National Park Service (19). Bill has passed away, as have so many of the men that I have known in the Forest Service and the State Park system. I’m now 85 and I don’t know whether I want to live to be a 105 but, at any rate, I’m glad I’m still surviving. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that I had my career in the National Park Service and the Forest Service and was not of doors so much of the time. But I came from a family of good genes where  all my uncles lived to be almost 100, and my great grandmother lived to be over 100. So who knows, I may outlast George Burns.  Well, Steve, that do you think? Is there anything else that we might discuss while I have the microphone here?

 How about your son’s work?

The Blanchfields like Crater Lake so much, and from the time my son was just a small lad, why, we used to camp at Diamond Lake and then at Crater Lake. We waited until the Annie Springs campground was built before we camped at Crater Lake. But from Diamond Lake we were always in and out of Crater Lake quite regularly, so by the time my son Jeff went Oregon State, he started as a forestry major. He worked his first years in college at South Lake Tahoe at the Forest Service Ranger Station there, and he was on fire control. He operated the big fire tanker and did fire control work, principally. The district ranger for the Forest Service suggested that he go to Oregon State and take forestry, which he did. Because of his years of being in and out of Crater Lake and the fact that I had been at Crater Lake also, he got motivated to write to the superintendent at Crater Lake. Knowing his background, the superintendent appointed him to work as assistant to Chief Ranger Buck Evans. So Jeff worked for six months while he was going to Oregon State. He graduated from Oregon State and went into the Law School at the University of Oregon. He continued his summers at Crater Lake and then he took graduate work and obtained his masters in Urban Planning at the University of Oregon. He kept on with his summer work at Crater Lake.

Jeff had some very interesting experiences. He maintained many of the motorways that I had worked on in 1930. He supervised a crew of men who did all the fire control work. He was involved in rescue work. I was up there one time when his crew had to go in and rescue a couple of fellows that were trapped on an old abandoned trail that originally went from Crater Lake Lodge down to the lake (20). This trail had been abandoned years before, so Buck Evans instructed my son to take his crew and go up [down] there. They could hear these fellows yelling from down below. I held the rope that helped one of the rangers and one of the fire crew members to rappel down to where these two fellows were. He carried along another rope with him so he could wrap it around one fellow at a time and we hauled them back up to the rim. When the last fellow was up there, why, Buck Evans, of course, was pretty well put out and he told the fellows I want to meet you two fellows in my office right now. The lodge employee who had told these two fellows where that trail was, they gave him a pretty good talking to. But Jeff had quite a fine six years of experience maintaining trails, motorways, and leading the crew in fighting fire. On one such fire, an army airplane went down just north of the north rim of Crater Lake. The pilot parachuted into the lake. The crew took a boat to pick him up while he relaxed in his portable float.

Foot notes:

  1. The Crater Wall Trail, in use from 1929 to 1959.
  2. Chief landscape architect for the National Park Service.
  3. Joe Mancini
  4. The Cleetwood Cove Trail opened in 1960.
  5. A hoist built by Park Mechanic Martin Palmer.
  6. The new road, which was a realignment of the Rim Drive built from 1913 to 1918, began with construction west of Rim Village.
  7. This section, now highway 230, was originally part of a wagon road connecting the Rogue Valley with the John Day country.
  8. A.P. Gianini
  9. Building 116.
  10. This was A.L. Peck, professor of landscape architecture at Oregon State College.
  11. George W. Peavy, dean of the school of forestry and former president of Oregon State University.
  12. Now known as the Pacific Northwest Region (Region 6) covering national forest lands in Oregon, Washington and Alaska.
  13. The position would be akin to the combination of a project supervisor and buildings and utilities foreman today.
  14. Davidson, by this time, had completed his six-month sentence which stemmed from his involvement in the scandal which forced Superintendent E.C. Solinsky from office.
  15. The term is sometimes misapplied to structures at Crater Lake.
  16. Tidal wave. This occurred in 1964 after the Alaska earthquake.
  17. One of the National Geographic’s aims was to find the tallest tree.
  18. Director of the National Park Service from 1940 to 1951; chief, California Division of Beaches and Parks from 1952 to 1959.
  19. Mott served as NPS director from 1985 to 1989.
  20. The Lake Trail, in use from 1906 to 1928.
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