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.
