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.
