Did you have problems with fires those years?
Yes, we had some. During the period of ’46-’50, we never had a big fire at Crater Lake. We had some that may have gone two or three acres. I can remember going to one which we thought might be in the Park. It was a Goose Egg or Goose Nest, which is just outside the Park to the south and we had to hike in quite a ways. I can remember taking a crew in there and it was probably about a two acre fire. But it actually was in the National Forest, not in the Park. And that’s the biggest fire that I served on while I was in the Park. The rest of them were primarily spot fires.
Were there Interagency Agreements at that time?
Yes.
You didn’t get detailed out?
We didn’t get detailed out. However, you could get detailed out to another park. It just so happened that none of us here did at that time. We had Fire Schools every year. In those days there were Regional Fire Schools, you would get together at a place like Mount Rainier or Lassen. Lassen is the Park that I went to a couple of times, once from Olympic, and once, as I recall from Crater Lake, for a Spring Fire School. It was a kind of a get together of Rangers. You got to know people from different parks and you got to know the Fire people from San Francisco, which is where the Regional Office was in those days-it was Region Four which covers the whole West Coast. We had Hawaii at that time. It can sound like we had very little to do in wintertime, but I can guarantee you that we managed to keep busy. I know as far as my wife and I were concerned, we didn’t have cabin fever. I can recall that when you were on our tour the other day, somebody mentioned cabin fever. I’m sure that there might have been one or two wives that id have cabin fever. Now it was a lot harder on the women than it was ever on the men because the men were out every day. Even though it got old fighting the snow sometime, as least you were out doing something else. Sometimes I think even in those days, and I was a lot stupider then than I am now, that I did feel sorry for my wife having to stay in all the time, because at that time she was taking care of our oldest son and then we had another son while we were here. She had two small children to take care of. When they went out to play, why of course, these was all the snow equipment and everything that you had to bundle them up in to get them outside and probably in about five minutes they had to come back inside again to go to the bathroom or something. Even in those days, I did feel sorry for these women, and there were people that had more than four kids.
