It seems to me that often the money comes with superintendents there in the park. And if a superintendent is off doing something else, it would be difficult to make all the internal improvements that you’ve discussed.
That’s right. They just don’t happen.
What were your main concerns in regard to terrestrial resources?
There are some concerns. Obviously, the park is established for the lake, The lake has to be your focus. If you lose track of the fact that the lake is the resource, then you are going to put disproportionate shares of money that are outside of your prime focus. Obviously, a concern there is the role and the attempt to establish a more natural ecosystem which includes forms of manipulation, certainly including fire.
As of the day I left Crater Lake, the fire program which aimed towards getting back to a natural ecosystem had failed virtually 100 percent. We really never accomplished a damn thing of any good significance towards a fire program and the restoration of the natural ponderosa and other ecosystems. We failed completely. In fact, we damaged it horribly through some of those fires down there in the panhandle.
I know of some fires in the early ’80’s. . .
There was some bad stuff while I was there. We didn’t have the information. The information was poor. It was poorly implemented. It just utterly failed. There was an issue that needed to be dealt with and still needs – well maybe it has been – to be dealt with, and while my tenure was there it failed completely. We just simply didn’t do anything right.
Did it seem like things were turning around a little bit with specialization, like in the FMOs (51)?
Keep in mind, when I left, we were trying to move into a more sane and a better researched situation there. It may have been getting better, but it sure wasn’t good. One of the problems we had in there was some awfully bad research. Again, we had scientists, so-called, in there and they were giving us really bad information and advice. What can you say? Sometimes you just totally fail, and from my perspective, and I was the chief duck, we failed.
