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.
