Was that about the time that you go interested in history as well?
No, it was separate. I just started getting good grades in history. So it was something to pursue. But I always had an interest in finding out why something was named that. Even as a little kid I always wanted to know why was it named or what happened at that spot. So it was more of a curiosity. My grandparents were too old to walk down to the trail, so I remember them sitting up on the rim. My brother and I, and the rest of the relatives, all walked down the trail, the old 1929 trail (1). The thing I remember the most is all the trail cutting that people did. It was a Sunday so there were a lot of tourists there. The rocks [were] falling constantly as people were going up and down because the kids were just allowed to cut. There didn’t seem to be any rule as far as staying on the trail. Nobody seemed to mind. I just remember the rocks rolling down, [and] the kids scrambling. Because the switchbacks were so close to each other, the trail went across slide areas. Every year they just rebuilt it and moved it back into the side of the mountain. That’s why it eventually was closed in ’59 because it was such a problem. When you look at it today, just the first couple of hundred feet of it’s there, but the rest of it is all gone.
It slid away?
It really eroded. There is a little bit at the very bottom, a little stone drywall that’s there, but that’s it. Then my father went to work for Tucker Sno Cat. Old Emmett Tucker was raised just outside of Prospect. He was raised with the idea of heavy snow and how it really affected their life. He had a real liking for Crater Lake. That was a real favorite spot of people in Prospect to take their friends. I remember he was always talking about Crater Lake. He looked like Henry Ford. He had the same outlook on life, basically. He treated his people about the same way. He could be real nice, but he could be real mean.
So he was already fully in production with the Snow Cats?
Yeah, when dad went to work for him in about ’54, ’55.
