How would you compare following year with 1988?
As it turned out, Steve, I changed position again. Both summers, 1988 and 1989, were similar. I thought you meant 1990, what happened after the sub left.
Oh, no.
The summer of 1988 and 1989 were very similar. This is where we prepared for the submarine, we had the fly-ins with helicopters, the generators, the 55 gallon drums of diesel for the generator. These were huge. We probably had a dozen of these 55 gallon drums that we couldn’t move. The helicopter had a place them right next to the generator. Then the generator was connected to these drums and drew its fuel out of there. All this planning had to take place before August, since we didn’t have much time. The summer crew comes on in the middle of June, so you have maybe six weeks to get the whole place in order. We also had our monitoring projects going on, overlapping this sub program that fit on top of it. These were very similar years with monitoring taking place alongside the high adventure submarine amid all the media attention. I think almost everyday there was a newspaper or magazine or TV crew coming on board to take some pictures of what we were doing out there. That was a pretty exciting time. In 1990 I went back to doing other things. I spent the following summers doing other projects, working for the college a bit. What I didn’t let go of was the work in the lab.
What happens when you monitor the lake??
We call it a trend week, a time of intense work on Crater Lake. It follows this protocol that Gary Larson has developed, which I don’t think is much different than what Doug Larson did. I go up for a couple of days and spend some time in the boat, and the lab. I complete the analysis done in the field lab and prepare samples for shipment to Corvallis. Each month I have this block of time, a couple of days that I spend in the park. I guess that has happened from 1990 onward. Gary Larson calls me and says, “I have your contract ready for this summer.”
And yet you’ve maintained a parallel track in teaching the summer college field studies class at Crater Lake.
The field class is another connection between the community college and the park because I do enjoy working up there. For me, summer is the time to do something different and you can’t really do field studies in the winter because of the weather. Students are not interested in being out in the rain or snow. I try to pick the best season that people would be the most comfortable, so the class is in August. I try to schedule it as late in August as I can, but our summer term end about the middle of August. I also come up for the trend work that is done each month.
