The well that’s around a tree.
That’s it, yeah. So you had to be very careful that you didn’t get too close to them. On a Snow Cat trip, you usually could figure that you had to put the track or tracks on at least once in a fifteen mile trip. It was a pleasure, but it was not a pleasure. Sometimes it could be a lot of work. I can remember one time during the winter, the power had gone out. It was the day before New Year’s. On that day the power company people came up here. The power line was down. You showed a picture of where the power line goes across Annie Creek canyon. The power line was down somewhere down there. I can recall that I took two of these people down that way and it had been snowing and was snowing and there was a lot of deep snow and loose snow. The Snow Cat didn’t work that well in loose snow, either. So we went down to the power line. I think we threw a track maybe two or three times on the way down there. Finally, we go almost down to the canyon and threw it so badly that there was no way that I could get it back. So there were two possibilities. One of them was to stay down there and stay the night and go out the next morning. If I had been by myself that’s exactly what I would have done. We had sleeping bags and all this sort of thing with us and it would have been no problem. The snow would have just filled over the Snow Cat and you could have stayed right underneath it and been very comfortable. Now, these two gentlemen didn’t want to, and they seemed to me at that time like they were old. Now I was in my twenties in those days and they probably in their thirties, so they were old. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. So we hiked all the way back in. I gave one of them my skis, and I think there were two pair of snow shoes and I took one pair of snow shoes and the other one took the other one. We hiked back in. I think it was probably around five miles that we hiked back in. I don’t recall exactly. We got in and I can recall that the Fitzeralds and the Howes were getting together for New Year’s Eve for some very mild entertainment. But I didn’t make it in time. I got home, I think, about a quarter after twelve. My wife was sound asleep in bed. It wasn’t much of a New Year’s Eve as far as I was concerned. But that’s just one of the things that happened with the Snow Cat. We also took the Snow Cat over to the east entrance. Sometimes, if there were several people, all would be towed on the skis behind it. It didn’t take too long to get over there if you went when the conditions were right. The snow lots of times were loose and light. The Snow Cat would sink down into it and you would have troubles with it, it just didn’t work that well. But if you had maybe three or four inches of snow over harder surface it went fine except on side hills. We’d have had to cut tracks along side hills. We went the old way, we didn’t go up around the Rim. To get to Lost Creek we went along the Grayback Ridge. At one place over there, where you look right down into Sun Creek, it’s pretty steep there when the snow builds up. It gets on an angle, of maybe 30 degrees or possibly even 35 and 40, and to go around that you then go way up in the trees above it or you had to cut a path across for your upper track. Sometimes that got a little bit sticky. But you could get across that way. When we went to the east entrance we would always take the Snow Cat. We would sometimes stay over there. I think I can recall staying in the old house that was there at that time, at least once. Sometimes we had to shovel snow off of the roofs over there because they were not in very good condition. Anyway, neither the entrance station nor the ranger station which is long gone from over there, were in good shape. We measured the snow down at the east entrance. Usually during that period of time, when we were over there we would go on up the Rim. We have some pictures, some slides taken of the lake frozen over at that time in 1949. We have some pictures taken from Kerr Notch. It was not uncommon to take the Snow Cat out to be looking around the in woods during the winter just to see what conditions were like. I noticed that you asked were there forest disease problems. We were having the start of bark beetle at that time.
