Was there much winter visitation, as far as skiers?
Yes. There was. And that was of course quite a bit of our work during the wintertime on weekends. There were several ski clubs. One of them came out of Klamath Falls, and I think there were two of them that came out of Medford. And they would come up here with their ski tows and set them up. Now they set them up like up here on the slopes of Garfield and then go out toward the north entrance not very far out and set up on some of those slopes that would be right alongside the road out there.
I haven’t noticed those yet. I’ve seen the one up here, just up the road.
There was one there, and there was one clear up at the Rim which is just below where the concessionaire’s building is now. The one that’s back in the trees, you know, south of the Lodge there. There was a ski tow in through there. They came up every weekend. Then about the second year we were here, I think it was the winter of ’47-’48, there was a commercial ski tow operation started in here and that’s the one that was on the hill behind, well, I’d say almost directly south, from the community house back there. There used to be a campground and stuff in there, and a pretty good slope. Now one of the problems that they had one winter was that the people would come up on a Friday and dig the rope out and invariably Friday night, it would start to snow. We perhaps would have beautiful weather all week and Friday it would start to snow, soon as they had the rope dug out. And so, by Saturday morning when they wanted to open up, the rope was under a couple of feet of snow. And I don’t say that lightly because it very easily snowed two feet over night. It was not uncommon around here, and let’s hopes that it does it again. It was like they were riding a streak of bad luck, that’s all, because it would seem to be always that way. They would get the thing all ready and then it would snow on them. And it would be late Saturday afternoon before they would get dug out again, still snowing. And by Sunday they would be ready to go and probably the storm would be bad enough so people wouldn’t come. So they did not make a go of it. That’s all there was to it. The ski clubs kept coming. Our own group of employees got together and we put money together and we bought, I don’t quite remember now who we bought if from, we bought a ski tow, the motor, and the rope and we sit it up in several places around here and used it ourselves for our own ski club. I don’t remember now what we called our ski club, but we had a name for it. And we had a lot of fun on it. We learned to ski around here, both my wife and I, on 7-foot 6-inch skis which were the skis the skis that the Army used during World War II. Now, no one in his right mind, as you can see. I’m not that tall; I’m about 5-10, and no one anymore would possibly think of doing anything like that except perhaps for cross country skiing. But we learned our downhill skiing that way. We switched within a year or so to shorter skis. My wife was skiing one time and we have a little argument about where it was. She thinks it was somewhere around the Superintendent’s house, and I think it was up at the Rim. We had a January where it didn’t snow for almost a month. We put the ski tow in with a snow cat and there were tracks where the snow cat had cut grooves into the snow and she came off of that ski tow and got in one of the grooves and couldn’t turn and she fell and twisted her knee and that put a stop to her skiing from then on, that and subsequent pregnancies. To get back to what we did in the wintertime. Of course, in those days and perhaps it’s still that way, the visitation dropped off at Crater Lake right after Labor Day. You could virtually take cannon up to the Rim and shoot it right down from where the concessions are now clear down to the Lodge and you wouldn’t have hit anybody. There just was no one here. The concession closed down right around the 10thto the 15th of September. And there were beautiful, golden Indian summer days. It was a glorious time to be at Crater Lake. But there weren’t many people here. However, we did keep the entrance station open. We closed the entrance station at the north sometime around the middle of September. Sometimes we closed it by the first snowstorm which usually came about the Fall Equinox. Sometimes we had to close it because of lack of personnel. There were only two or three of us here to take care of it. But we did keep the one at Annie Spring open. We moved up from the south and the west. I should mention that, in those days, we had an entrance station at the south entrance and at the west entrance and at the north entrance, clear out at the entrances.
