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.
