O. W. Pete Foiles

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

Otis “Pete” Foiles Oral History Interview

Interviewer and Date: John Morrison, Crater Lake National Park Historian, August 4, 1987

Transcription: Transcribed by Cheryl Ryan, September 1997

Biographical Summary (from interview introduction)

Otis “Pete” Foiles, park ranger 1939 – 1942. My predecessor, John Morrison, conducted a total of seven interviews during the four months he served as historian in 1987.  Pete Foiles was among the former park employees he interviewed, but a backlog of tapes and no funds for transcription meant that processing did not take place until a decade later. Fortunately Mr. Foiles remained at the same address all this time so that I could locate him for help with the editing process and release of the transcription.

Materials Associated with this interview on file at the Dick Brown library at Crater Lake National Park’s Steel Visitor Center: taped interview

To the reader:

My predecessor, John Morrison, conducted a total of seven interviews during the four months he served as historian in 1987.  Pete Foiles was among the former park employees he interviewed, but a backlog of tapes and no funds for transcription meant that processing did not take place until a decade later.  Fortunately Mr. Foiles remained at the same address all this time so that I could locate him for help with the editing process and release of the transcription.

The follows is a short account of life at Crater Lake over a three year period, from December 1939 to October 1942.  Some related information is in another interview with Hazel Frost (since deceased) that Morrison conducted on the same day in 1987, and one by Jeff LaLande with Arch Work in 1981.  The later appeared as part of the third volume in a series called “Recollections: People and the Forest,” printed by the Rogue River National Forest in 1990.

Stephen R. Mark

(Crater Lake National Park Historian)

November 1997

My name is Pete Foiles.  I was a permanent ranger at Crater Lake from December 1939 to October of 1942.  Prior to that time I had been a seasonal ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park where the superintendent was David Canfield.  Dave was a former Crater Lake superintendent and when my name came up on the register he recommended me to the people at Crater Lake.  They selected me and I am sure glad that they did because it turned out to be three of the best years of my life.

When I went to Crater Lake in December of 1939, it was one of those years when they had a real light snow.  I guess this was the only time that it happened.  I was able to get up and see a good deal of the rim before the snows started.  When they did start, we received lots of snow.

Prior to my arrival to Crater Lake the permanent ranger force consisted of just three people.  The Chief ranger, Carlisle Crouch, along with Jack Frost and Brent Finch as the other two rangers.  When I showed up, I made the third permanent ranger.  It was quite a bit smaller force than I was used to at Rocky Mountain, which was bigger park and had a lot more people on the staff.  It was really an experience.  The snow was probably one of the things that stand out.  Most of the park was closed in the winter time, but prior to my arrival they had made the decision to keep the road to the rim open in the winter time (1).  That became a real attraction for tourists;  they wanted to see that much snow.  The park had three rotary snow plows and, as I recall, about nine snows plow operators who worked pretty much around the clock to keep the road open.  They kept about 26 miles of the road open in the park.  The real justification was so that they would not have to have the expense of opening the road up in the spring.  The total snow depth was something like 55 feet on an average.  One year they had as much as 72 feet of accumulated snow fall, I think.

It was a real isolated affair in the winter time.  The Park Headquarters was in Medford and the superintendent and most of the office force lived in Medford.  The chief ranger moved to Klamath Falls and maintained an office there.  About ten families lived in the park during the winter.  This included the three permanent rangers, a warehouse man named Doug Roach, and about a half dozen or so snow plow operators.  Most of the snow plow operators lived down at Fort Klamath, which is about 17 miles away.  They came up for their shift on the plows.  For the ten families in the park it was a close knit community, I guess you would say.  There was no school, and no children of school age while I was there.  Later on I think they did try to run a school in the park, but not while I was there (2).

The main three C camp which had been there prior to when I arrived was gone as such, but they did maintain a “spike camp” in the winter with maybe a half dozen or so fellas (3).  They were quartered in the rooms over the machine shop (4).  These fellas helped out with snow shoveling and other duties around the park in the winter time.  The winter was a real interesting time.  Not many visitors during the week, but on weekends there were quite a few.  Mostly skiers from Klamath Falls.  The Park Service as such did not go in much for large ski development, but did permit skiing so long as it did not interfere with the main reason for having the park.  We would get probably a thousand skiers each weekend.  Most were from Klamath Falls, and the rest of them were from Medford.

The job of a ranger is, of course, protection first of all.  Law enforcement didn’t turn out to be too big at Crater Lake.  They never had any real serious problem of that nature.  But we kept signs up, everything open, and gave information to the tourist.  [Speaking of] helping out visitors to the park, I remember we had a series of emergency telephones through the park in the deep snow country.  When someone would get in trouble they would get their way to one of these emergency telephones to call for help.  We would go help them.  I recall one morning I was patrolling down the road and ran into a couple that had been stranded all night in deep snow.  They were right by one of these phones and the sign there said,” Emergency Telephone.”  They were cold and in pretty bad shape and I said, “Why didn’t you go to the phone and give us a call so we could help you out?”  The guy said, “ Well, I saw the sign but it said “In case of emergency only.”  I guess they figured they didn’t really have an emergency cause they were still in pretty good shape.

A lot of our work at that time was custodial.  Maintaining the checking station, counting visitors, taking care of the receipts.  In the summer, of course, is when the business really picked up and I’m sure the numbers are a lot greater now than when I was there.  We used to get a quarter million visitors a year.  I’m sure it is way over that now (5).  It is one of the scenic gems of the [national park] system.  Crater Lake is not a park where people  spent a long period of time like some national parks where they go spend several weeks.  It’s more like a day or two, then go on your way.

When I was there we built a boat house on Wizard Island to house the boats that took passengers on the lake.  It was, and I’m sure still is, a very outstanding trip.  Fishing was not a big deal on the lake.  The original fish were planted and there was fishing during the time we were there.

I believe they quit planting the lake in 1941.

They must have because I know we planned fish one year when I was there.  That would have been in 1941.  It was have been the last year.  The fish were hauled down in tanks on pack animals.

  1. P Leavitt was the superintendent, and his assistant superintendent was Tom Parker.  One of the real old timers was on the clerical force, Ethel Wilkinson.  It seems like she had been there for a long time (6).  She was what I guess you would call “old timers” in the office.

When did you move into the stone house?

We moved into to the stone house April of 1940.  During the time I was at Crater Lake I lived in three different houses.  The first one I moved into was one of the stone houses, which was when I got married in 1940 and they assigned me the house.  It had formerly been occupied by the resident engineer, who worked for the Bureau of Public Roads when they were building the road up there (7).  I was single the first year I was in the park and didn’t have any household goods or furnishings anything of that type.  When I announced that I was going to get married, someone said, “Why don’t you go see Mr. Strubble?”  He was the resident engineer and he was being transferred, and we understood that he wanted to sell what he had. So I went to see Mr.  Strubble and he said he wanted to sell everything he had in his house.  All his furniture, rugs on the floor, curtains on windows, dishes, even brooms, mops and playing cards.  Everything in the house, the whole works.  I said, “Fine, do you have any idea what you want for it?” He thought for just a minute and said, How about $ 35.00 for the whole works?”  So I said, Okay, I’ll take it”  As fate would have it, they assigned me that house.  All I had to do was move in since it was already furnished.  There I was with a house that was completely furnished for $35.00.

The next summer I moved from that house, which was one of the stone houses, into a small house on the bank near Annie Spring and lived there all that winter (8).  The next year they decided they wanted me at headquarters again, so they moved me into another one of the stone houses.  That made three different houses I lived in during the three years I was there.

When I was single I didn’t live in a house at all.  I lived in a bunk over the Mess hall (9).  One of the things that the cook was very fond of was lamb stew.  He used to use a little more fat then I like in lamb.  That got me to the point where I do not like lamb even to this day.  [This is due to] all the lamb stew I ate in the Mess hall at Crater Lake.

What was the social life like in the winter?

The social life was playing card games, with the families.  As I said, families were real close.  I guess you could call them “impromptu parties.”  It was pretty common to go to somebody’s house or they would come to ours.  We called them parties or informal get together.  We played cards a lot.  Radio was the main type of communication we had, of course, there being no TV in those days.  We had telephones which connected you with the other people at headquarters.  Anything outside of that was a long distance call which we didn’t use very much.

The park had an electrician and the power company was responsible for the line to the park boundary only, not inside the park.  It was a pretty common event in the winter time or during a big storm for the power to go out.  Usually a tree across the line or something, because the right of way that they cleared for the line was minimal.  They were thinking more of the scenic values than of getting electricity to headquarters.  I’d say two or three times every winter, at least, something would go against the line and we would be without power.   The way we usually handled  that was the ranger would start patrolling that until they found the problem,  then we would go out to the road and get the electrician to go take care of the problem.  Handing electrical wire was not in our job description.  The line don’t go along side the road but is back probably a quarter mile from the road, so as not to be visible.  This is good from the scenic standpoint, but not very handy when you are trying to find a break in the line.

The houses we lived in had electricity for cooking (electric stoves) so when the power would go off we had no way to cook.  The houses were kept warm with circulating heaters.  That type had a kind of a barrel in the middle of the heater with something around the outside to make it look pretty.  Essentially it was a big barrel, an oil stove that was fueled by stove or fuel oil.  The oil was poured into a tank in the back and kept a flame going in the barrel.  When the power went off, we would cook by taking the lid off the circulating stove on the top of the barrel.  It wasn’t a very fast way, but it got the job done.  We didn’t suffer too much since we sure were warm and comfortable inside the houses.  The snow normally would be clear over the top of the roof of the houses before the winter was over and the heat from the house caused the snow to melt back from the edge of the house a few feet.  It made a sort of a tunnel clear around the house,  so that wildlife could get access.   The marten in particular sometimes ran around these tunnels.  You could open the window and see them.  We never had any at house, but some of the families did.

The only type of development permitted for skiing were temporary tows that could be dismantled in the spring and taken down.  They had a couple of those.  There was one on the slide coming off Garfield Ridge near headquarters.  Another one in a bowl not to far down behind the lodge.  A lot of the skiing was trail skiing.  Visitors and employees would ride up to the rim of the crater.  Someone would drive the car back down to Park Headquarters and the rest would ski down the trails, then ride back up to the top and ski down again.  For a while visitors used  some of the three C boys that were stationed in the park the first year I was there.  Some of the visitors would talk them into driving their cars down so they could ski down.  That worked fine until one of them proceeded to run a private car into a snow bank and tear it up a little bit.  That put a stop to it, and we said no more.  Too much liability involved in that.  We used to ski at night when the moon was not, going from Rim Village down to the headquarters area.  A couple of times each winter the ski club from Klamath Falls would have a evening dance and folks would get together in the Community House at the rim.

What was the lodge like at that time?

I am one of these people that think the lodge is not something to be preserved (10).  It has served its purpose, and of course it was only open in the summer time because in the winter it would be almost impossible to keep open.  It was an expensive operation because of the snow conditions and getting the place open every year was work.  I think a better place for a lodge is down off the rim someplace where you don’t get quite the deep snow and don’t have to battle the elements like you do up on top.   Of course, you have they view up there but then I never felt it was a real architectural gem or that kind of thing.  Like I said, it has served its purpose. I think there are better ways meeting the needs of visitors.

Did you know that Will Steel wanted to build a larger lodge up by Wineglass?

No, I did not know that.  They came up with all kinds of ideas.  There was one proposal to build a tramway from the rim over to Wizard Island and back.  That was just talk, I don’t think they were ever serious- but there were proposals.

In the sixties they talked about building a tunnel. (11)

I guess I am one who thinks that Mother Nature did a pretty good job and will stick with that.  Don’t try to come in with any more man-made facilities then we need.  There have been two or three different roads to the rim and of course you are going to have people say that you have to have roads in this day and age.  But the roads shouldn’t dominate the scene.  Of course, the rim around the crater is the real attraction.

Were you still there for the winter that both bridges were out?  I think that was the winter of 1942?

No, in 1942 the park was not even open in the winter because of World War II.

It may have been in April of 1942?

It must have happened after I was there.  They replaced a bridge at Annie Spring when I was there but it was just because the old one was no longer safe (12).  It never disrupted the traffic or anything like that.

They had a by pass road around there and it was 14 years before they ended up putting in a new bridge.  You can still see where the old road [ around the top of the drainage] went.

I did not leave until October 1942.  That was when they replaced the bridge.  I remember that some of timbers from the bridge were what I used to cook with in my house down at Annie Spring.

[Response to wife, Becky]  Some of the early snow studies were done at Crater Lake because they have real deep snow there it had easy access (13).  The Soil Conservation Service conducted the study for a couple years and a fella named Arch work, in Medford, was the man in charge of that study for the Soil Conservation Service (14).  They had a couple of pits within the parks.  The rangers got involved with digging the holes and studying the various layers of snow and that sort of thing.  Jack Frost ended up being the snow surveyor for the Soil Conservation Service.  His original contact with the work was through Arch Work and his studies at Crater Lake.  In the winter of 1942, when the decision was made not to keep Crater Lake open any longer, the Soil Conservation Service offered Jack the job as snow surveyor.  He took that job and transferred to the Soil Conservation Service from the Park Service.  That was about the same time I left Crater Lake and went to the Forest Service.  We moved to Union Creek which was a ranger station about 17 miles down the road toward Medford (15).  Jack remained with the Soil Conservation Service for the duration of his federal employment and I stayed with the Forest Service for the duration of my career as a federal employee.  We never forgot Crater Lake, either one of us,  that’s for sure.  We really had good times there.

Footnotes:

  1. The NPS kept the park open on an experimental basis beginning in 1936.
  2. This began in 1949 and lasted until 1965.
  3. Camp Annie Springs generally operated only during the May through October enrollment period.  Enrollees were usually sent to other locations such as Oregon Caves in the enrollment period which ran from November through April.
  4. Building 5.
  5. Annual visitation has averaged 500,000 since the 1960’s.
  6. Wilkinson served as the Superintendent’s Secretary from 1927 to 1947.  She retired at Lassen Volcanic National Park in 1955.
  7. Most of the road building activity centered on the Rim Drive, a project that was completed in 1939.  A BPR engineer had been assigned to the park beginning in 1927.
  8. Building 129, demolished in 1987.
  9. Building 3, now called the Canfield Building. The bunks were on the second story.
  10. This interview took place before a decision had been reached to rehabilitate the building.
  11. Superintendent Leavitt backed this proposal in the early 1940’s, an ideas to be accompanied by relocation the Rim Campground. NPS Director Newton Drury overruled him by opposing the tunnel,  favoring instead the expansion of the camping at Annie Springs.
  12. As rustic wood bridge over Annie Creek built in 1928 was replaced, though the new bridge and the one over Goodbye Creek were found to be unsafe in the late 1940’s
  13. The snow courses at Annie Springs and Park Headquarters date from this period.
  14. The experiment sought to determine snow density changes during deposition and melting periods, and was aimed at better predictions of water yield.
  15. Union Creek remained a separate district of the Rogue River National Forest until 1962, when it was consolidated with Prospect.
Other pages in this section