This was because of the legislation?
Right! During the summer of 1982 the Park Service was very interested to get ahead of the legislation. They didn’t want to be told what to do. They wanted to say, “We already have a lake monitoring program in place. Thank you for helping us with this (15)”. We were making our protocols and there was a person hired for working on the lake. Mike Gillmore was running the boat. He did sampling every week or two, and took care of the equipment, building sampling boxes—some of which we still use today. They’ve lasted a long time. I would help him when I could. I was still an interpreter in 1982, so I couldn’t be there long. Mike was resource management with Jon Jarvis and Mark Forbes, they were all in a group. I became the forth member of the lake group in 1983. A year later Mike left to do other things. He finished his master’s degree about then, in urban planning (16). I think his degree had something to do with Crater Lake, since he spent time talking to visitors, finding out what their pattern of activities were as they came into the park.
Were there program goals at that time, and was Doug Larson the principal investigator?
Absolutely! Doug was calling the shots on the lake at that time. One of his methods to get us to work for him really worked. He wrote a protocol for the lake research and put my name on it. In the end I don’t know if it came out with both our names on the protocol, but I seem to remember that I felt really a part of what was going one. I don’t know about program goals. Doug would say this is what we should be doing and that is what we did. Basically it was a monitoring effort. That effort expanded when the Park Service hired a limnologist.
[Break to change side of tape.]
We left off with Doug Larson working to develop protocol for the lake monitoring in 1982. You mentioned, Steve , that there was some legislation directed the Park Service to start a monitoring program. I guess that legislation didn’t come with any money.
It just told the NPS to find money.
The missing piece here is, could Doug Larson have started a monitoring program just by asking for it? The answer is probably no. he was one of many passing limnologists who just happened to be in the park for a certain period of time. Doug was fortunate in being given some authority to actually do some paid work. What Doug realized was that Crater Lake could be in trouble and he wrote that it had lost 25 percent of its clarity. What happened was that in 1968 and 69 when he was finishing his degree in limnology, he was getting secchi disk reading of 40 meters for Crater Lake. When I was with him in 1978-79 he was getting 30s. If you compare 30 to 40, Crater Lake had lost 25 percent of its clarity. He asked what is the Park Service doing about it? Could the NPS be faulted for this current problem? The Park Service didn’t want to hear any of this. It sounded bad, so any Park Service manager wouldn’t want to hear this. I don’t know how it happened, but then Doug is quite a letter writer. He wrote to the Oregonian. He copied his letter to every legislator that he knew in Oregon and probably the President of the United States. It hit a high note in the political system. Managers of the Park Service were asked, “What is going on out there?” That is why the legislation was passed and I’m sure that is why the Park Service wanted to already have a monitoring program in place (17). They [park management] didn’t want to be told to start a program.
