Did there seem to be certain cycles of bark beetle?
Yes, very definitely. Those were the days when the Park Service thought that they had to take immediate steps to prevent or to eradicate bark beetle. The Park Service spent, I would suspect, literally millions of dollars or at least a million dollars to take care of bark beetle and blister rust and this sort of thing. Blister rust, of course, came in from Canada. So it’s not a natural situation. But we spent an awful lot of money trying to eradicate blister rust clear down into Sequoia/ Kings where blister rust has never been found I don’t think, as far as I know.
That’s the Ribes?
That’s right. Later on when I was Assistant Chief at Sequoia. I was in charge of the blister rust program. We used about forty or fifty people. We used them for fire crews, they were great fire crews. They were in fantastic condition from hiking up and down hills. That was the best thing that they were for. The bark beetle was starting to come into Crater Lake at that time. Now within a very few years they had quite a program, because a man by the name of Verne Bertsch came on here. His first ranger job was here. He later worked for me at Sequoia. He died in office back in Washington, D.C. of a heart attack. But he was in charge of the bark beetle control project. He did a lot of it over on the east side of the park. He did a lot of cutting over there, cutting and burning is what they would do.
