Different from now?
Oh, yes.
Jean: Not ten feet, at least fifteen feet.
They were long, dark snow tunnels. Some of the snow tunnels at Sleepy Hollow I think must have been thirty feet long the way they had to be put in order that you could plow in front of those snow tunnels. Sometimes those snow tunnels had to be dug off and shoveled off too, because they weren’t the stoutest things in the world, although they were fairly good snow tunnels.
That one at the Administration Building was different from the A-frame that was up until a couple of years ago?
Oh yes, you bet. It was much narrower than that, it probably wasn’t wider. I’m sure you could have stood in it and held your arms out and you would have touched the sides of the snow tunnel. It was strictly a way to get thought.
Jean: I think we have a picture of that.
We probably do. Maybe we can get you that.
Most of the pictures we have, the buildings too deep under the snow to make out that particular snow tunnel.
One thing we had to do all the time was shovel out our comfort station at the rim. That had to be shoveled out. There was a snow tunnel to each entrance, both the men and the women’s side at the rim comfort station. But we had to shovel out to get to that, because the plow would come along the curve and the plow would always put snow into the snow tunnel; it never failed.
Jean: Snow drifted into the snow tunnel, too.
So badly. There would be times when the snow tunnels, like at the houses or at the rim would be piled clear up to the top of the snow tunnel and you’d have to crawl over the thing and start throwing snow back out again. I know at least one time, and I think it was after we left, that one of the equipment operators lived at Sleepy Hollow. His little boy was coming into the snow tunnel and he met a bear coming out. We don’t know what happened except that we know that the boy wasn’t hurt, but probably shocked. But that goes into another thing about the wildlife. But, we also, in shoveling had to keep a path up to the rim so you could go up and be able to see the prime thing we have here—the lake. We had a rope that we put along the rim. We planted it on snow poles. It probably extended a hundred yards each way from where the present location is and where that tin snow tunnel is a present time. We had signs on it to keep people from going beyond that rope. We shoveled steps up there. Now, of course, if you got a melting situation then you had to do this probably twice a day anyway. This was a job that we did every day as long as the road to the Rim was opened. In those days, virtually all the time we kept the road to the rim opened.
Was the cafeteria opened during the winter?
No, the cafeteria was not opened but there was a lunch counter in- what’s the name of that building, the one that’s used as kind of an Interpretive Center?
