We’ve mentioned the winter duties. Like I said before, it sounds like we didn’t have much to do. But you also have to remember that the period of time from 1946, ’47 and ’48, there were only three rangers here most of the time. That was the Chief Ranger and two acting Assistant Chief Rangers. There were only three of us: Clyde Gilbert, Dewey Fitzgerald, and myself. One of us was off duty a good deal of the time, so the things that were done, you did it. You did them, just you. You had to patrol the roads. We made sure that somebody went out on the roads every day when it wasn’t snowing hard, which in those years seemed like it wasn’t very often. We had telephone boxes out along the roads in those days, too. I don’t know it you knew about that part.
No, I didn’t.
We had, and I don’t recall how many, but there must have been al least three telephone boxes out the west road and at least three or four on the south road. These were emergency telephone boxes. We had to keep those dug out all the time and checked. We didn’t have to repair the lines, although the ranger force assisted in repairing those lines when they went down and they did go down a good deal of the time. It seemed like when you wanted those telephone boxes they weren’t in operation. I don’t know what year those telephone boxes went out, probably very shortly after the ‘40’s, because radio came in and I’m sure that once we had car radios the telephones went out.
Another gap in our records.
I suppose it might be considered a minor thing, I just happened to think about it. But they did serve their purpose, and several times it was very valuable to have those telephones in. That was another winter project; we had to keep those boxes shoveled out so that you could get into them if you had to use them. As I said, we shoveled up at the rim virtually every day. Now, it wasn’t always that way. But we had to got up and check it to make sure, because even if it wasn’t snowing there was enough loose snow around that comfort station entrances could be drifted shut and the path [to view the lake] up to the Rim could have been drifted shut. We had to continually chop stairs or cut stairs in so people could get out. Now it was not an easy way to get up to see the lake. You had to want to see the lake in order to do it. But that was part of our duties. There were reports to be written. I can’t recall now much about the reports except the Chief Ranger’s monthly report, but those had to be made all the time on what was to be said. We did have to make two or three snow surveys each month. We made a snow survey, one of them was down by Anni Spring. Probably the snow course is still there. I imagine it is. I don’t know. The Soil Conservation Service, of course, set up these snow courses, but the park rangers did the work. We always took the snow course. The Soil Conservation did not do the snow courses. One of the men who were prominent in the Soil Conservation Service at Medford, I believe at the time, his name was Jack Frost ironically enough. I’m not kidding.
