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.
