They didn’t damage vehicles?
No.
Jean: I thought there was one time when they got our car tires when we were in the Annie Springs house.
Some people think they like to dine on the hoses and that’s their excuse for shooting them.
Well, the only reason that they would dine on tires that I know of would be because of the salt from your snow salting in the wintertime. That would be the reason. You may be right about that. It wasn’t a big thing. Of course there were porcupines around. We did have problems.
Now, you asked did we make use of the motorways or the backcountry cabins. We did make some use of at least the Bear Creek cabin for boundary patrol and in the fall for deer patrol.
There wasn’t any active wilderness management as far as those motorways were concerned?
No, we used them for fires or to get to fires. Nobody ever heard of the wilderness in those days. When the Wilderness Act finally came in, there was man of us in the Park Service who said this is a farce, we are a wilderness anyway. We manage our backcountry as a wilderness. We did in places like Yellowstone and Yosemite and these big natural areas and Olympic. I’m not implying that the Wilderness Act was bad or anything of the sort, it’s an excellent Act. But it did do something for Crater Lake, it got rid of the motorways, and I don’t think the motorways were necessary. They were nice. It was a nice deal to be able to take of at 1:00 in the afternoon and spend four hours out in the motorways and be able to come back and go home. It was a nice way to spend an afternoon if things were slow, which they were sometimes.
You can’t do the amount of windshield in the park that you could in the forest areas.
There was quite an extensive network of motorways. They were in all quadrants of the Park.
Were adjacent areas like Sky Lakes or Mt. Thielsen managed as wilderness areas at that time?
Not that I know of. No, they were just there and they were difficult to get to. Of course, there were not nearly as man logging roads into places in those days. That’s because logging was just starting to become a booming industry in ’46.
The lower elevation forest was still being cut.
They had plenty of places to cut where they didn’t have to come up this high and didn’t have to intrude on areas we now consider wilderness areas. So there was no problem there. We used the motorways sometimes in the wintertime. They were good paths. We had some high markings on the trees, on a lot of the trees that went through these motorways so that we could take skis through or a Snow Cat.
