Emmett Blanchfield

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.