That must have been why there was a campground relocation study done in ’43 about moving the rim campground to an area near Discovery Point where the drifting isn’t bad and they could keep the campgrounds open longer.
Oh, I see. It would have been terrible to put one out there, but practically it was a good idea. About the third week of July was when they got that thing (campground) opened up on the rim. You remember there was a campground right behind the Headquarters. You can still see the roads below the Superintendent’s house right up around the creek area. That was the preseason-campground. People would come up there and camp. It wasn’t a really developed campground, but they allowed people to camp there while waiting for the snow to melt on top. When that melted out in the last park of July, people’d start camping up at the rim.
So that area of Steel Circle was allocated for a spring campground?
No, it was right up Munson Creek from where the Administration Building is.
Into the meadow?
Yeah, right in that meadow. You can see the openings where the cars parked and so on. It was never really developed from my understanding.
That’s why the comfort stations are there?
I picked that up from a lady I met. They also had tents set up for employees, which had wooden floors. They’d camp there until they could move to the rim and live up there. Behind the lodge they had a lot of tent houses set up. During the wintertime, they’d stand them up and let the snow just slide off the flooring. They’d drop it back down in the summer and erect the tents. But a lot of people lived up there, a lot of employees. They spent their whole time right on the rim.
My next experiences were basically winter experiences at Crater Lake. We’d go up there and run the Snow Cat around. I remember one year that had 35 feet of snow, Mr. Tucker took out a full page ad in the Mail-Tribune. I remember it cost a sum of 50 dollars. People kept talking about how he took an ad out for 50 dollars. This man must be rich. Then he advertised for anybody who wanted to come up and ride the ‘cats free. They constructed a trailer on four skis. It held about 25 people. It looked like a square school bus. They toward it around. Mr. Tucker did a lot of the driving and he was an absolute madman. Because he wanted to sell his ‘cats, he wanted to show people what they could do with them. My dad still, to this day, talks about when I was in the back and Mr. Tucker ran a ski along the berm where it was dug out for the parking lot. He would drive as close as he could to the edge with the skis of the trailer right behind, loaded down with 25 people. Just gunning the ‘cat wide open. I remember when he wanted to put it back on the truck, they didn’t have a loading ramp. So he just drove it right off the top of a bank. He just smashed it right onto the truck and drove away with it. But he was in it when it went over the edge. He shoved a lot of snow with it, but the man wild up there. We took some pictures and I have them hanging up at the house. They were taken in the sixties and show them racing around up where the campground is, right behind the lodge. And they were encouraged to come up there. It gave something for people to do, especially on weekends. Nobody thought of insurance or liability problems. If you got hurt, that was just the cost of coming up.
