Even though it’s higher than the other government campground in the surrounding areas.
Yeah, because Park Service campgrounds are not based on Forest Service rates. It’s based on what Crater Lake Lodge Company can get for equal service. In fact, I think they upped it to eight and backed it down to seven after a lot of complaints a year or two ago. We had a crew, I was on it for awhile, of three people and all we did was provide firewood for the campgrounds. You were expected to make firewood available when a camper came in and camped free. Those big bins that you see, down at Annie Springs, I mean at Mazama, were built and we kept them full to the top with firewood. You could just back up there and haul that stuff off like butter. One day they started looking at the cost of that. It was a pretty expensive thing to do and it wasn’t really in keeping with the Park Service because they were cutting up every dead tree that they could get their hands on. We weren’t falling anything, but all the winter stuff that went down was all cut up.
This isn’t really related, but how did the idea of the Corrals come about? I found the design sheet for this bizarre idea for an overlook (40). How did that come about?
Well, I was told it was to save the white bark pine out there. The idea was to build it sturdy enough so that the people wouldn’t walk through it and it wouldn’t collapse in the wintertime. Those are just peeler logs that they were using basically. So it was fairly cheap. But the oldest white bark there is drying because of the damage that had been done to it already. All it would take is somebody to run out there with a dump truck of pumice and fill that void up. But if you’ve noticed, it’s dropped two feet around there. The wind is just slowly scouring because it was part of a road cut. I was noticing last summer the top part of that old white bark is almost dead. That thing is 300 or 400 years old. If somebody just dumped some dirt on it. Why can they be so blind to that solution, especially when it was designed to save that tree? Have you noticed there are some young ones coming up along there, which is kind of encouraging. But basically it’s just become a wind trap for the paper and it swirls around in there and you always have a mess from all the litter that lands in there.
