Can you say something about your experiences at Crater Lake?
I can’t recall all the times we visited Crater Lake. It was many times. I don’t think it was annually, but certainly many times during the course of the year. I remember one time we came to Crater Lake from Glacier Point. The tubes had been drenched from a heavy rainstorm. They were too heavy for use. But Hank Tanski and John Salinas got us all sorts of heavy weight materials, about forty pounds of steel that we could us to rebalance the tube so that the telescopes could be brought back to use as the Rim. They put traffic cones on the parking areas to reserve the spaces for our telescopes and we could give slide presentations in the Community House after the formal talks given by park naturalists. It was very important for us to do these slide programs, because it allowed us to talk to the public about what it is they are about to see. I believe that it is essential to have a slide program that introduces the public as to what they are about to see through the telescope, before actually allowing them to look through the eyepiece. [JD refers to this as “flushing them down the tubes.”]
I am forever grateful for the assistance at Crater Lake. Hank would even let me stay in his home at Park Headquarters and let us take showers. He arranged for subsidizing our meals ($7.00 if we ate on our and $12.00 if we ate in the restaurant). It was just marvelous. It was wonderful when Hank Tanski was there. I don’t recall whether or not we were made official volunteers in the parks, however.
Over how many summer did the Sidewalk Astronomers visit Crater Lake?
I can’t recall, but certainly it was many summers in a row. We would stay for about sixteen days and have several assistants, but far fewer than our maximum number of about eight Sidewalk Astronomers. Unfortunately, we have no written account of our activities at Crater Lake and no photographs. We never used cameras. I’ve never owned a camera. I think our first visit was in the late 1970s and our last was in the 1990s. I enjoyed giving public slide programs at the Community House at Rim Village and then to talk to those who were curious enough to stay our after dark and climb the ladder to the eyepiece of the telescope.
