The Community House.
In the Community House [Rim Center] there was a lunch counter in there and I think, in the last year or so, it was kept open pretty much all the time as long as the weather was halfway decent; it was run by the wife of one of the equipment operators, Lee Fulton. She ran that quite a bit.
So it wasn’t a concession operation?
No, it wasn’t a concession operation. But it was probably a special use permit that the Park Service granted to her to run that up there at that time.
A bit like some Forest Service kinds of operations.
Yes, and incidentally the Fultons, I think, are still around here. I don’t know whether they are still around or not. They were here for a long, long time. I think John and Lee’s son works here now (4).
John Fulton was here. In fact, I have his post office box. He’s moved on, but he moved, I think, about two months before I got here.
Where did he go, do you know?
Maureen [Briggs] would know.
Anyway, it was Lee that operated that. But before that time, on the weekends, I think there was a sub-concession from the concessionary. It was part of the concession at that time. They would go up and open on Saturday and Sunday for the skiing crowd that came in. We did have it pretty good when the weather allowed it. It wasn’t Lodge concession that ran the ski tow, it was another concessionary- like the special use permit. When it was running, there were quite a few people who came up here on the weekends, because we were busy on the weekends. We had numerous accidents. Most of them were fender benders, as I can recall; we never had anything that was real serous.
None of the tragic accidents…people falling. We have pictures of cars in canyons.
I can’t recall any real serious ones in the wintertime because people were going fairly slowly. The worst part of it is everybody, because of the high snow banks, would have a tendency to go away from the high snow banks and pull toward the center of the road. It was a very stupid thing to do because the snow banks couldn’t hurt you too much. Now the might scratch your car, but people would do this. Now those of us who knew hoe to drive here we would drive close to the snow banks because that was the safe place to be. But this was where a lot of things happened. People go minor injuries and this sort of thing. We had a First Aid hut up at the rim. We took care of a lot of ski injuries up there. It was just a little portable shed, it was one room, and had a little oil stove in it with room enough for a cot.
