Probably a little mentally disturbed. Sat down there on the railing, the stone railing, with two of his sisters. And he wound his watch, and I don’t know if the said goodbye, but he just stepped over. Now if you recall what that looks like, there is not a sheer drop off. It’s a drop about like that. So we started down. I know Fitzgerald and myself were there and probably several seasonals. We started down there and as we got farther and farther down there we couldn’t find him anywhere. So we went clear on down to the lake. The lake shore is filled with a lot of rubble. Big rocks and this sort of thing. We still could not find him. And we even started back up to look into side pockets. Fitzgerald looked out onto the lake and he saw somebody floating out there, and what he saw was an air bubble underneath the man’s coat. The best we could tell is the man broke his shoulder when he went down. And when he got to the lake shore he got up and walked into the water and drowned himself. That’s what he had to do. Cause he could not have fallen. The terrain itself is flat like this desk; it’s filled with a lot of rubble and everything, but it’s flat. And he had to walk into the water and he had to drown himself, cause he didn’t die of anything else. So then, of course, it was the big problem of getting him back up. Well we had no winches, no nothing in those days, it was probably ’47 or something like that. So, we had to physically manhandle him back up on the stretcher, and just as we put him into the hearse, which had come up from Klamath Falls, the dog-gonest thunderstorm you ever saw let go and it just absolutely drenched us, drowned us, but fortunately it happened after we got him up.
The second one was, I think the next year; it happened the summer of ’48. And there was a couple of fellas hiking over on Applegate, far side of it. They both had slick soled shoes and they were way up, they were fairly above those kind of stops, you know little benches up there. And one of them slipped and went down and fell and he killed himself. I don’t recall how we got the word, but we did get the word. I got over there, and the chief ranger, Clyde Gilbert, and I think there were a couple of seasonals. I was the first one to find the body. What I could tell, was that it was no question in my mind that he was dead. Well Clyde was a little bit overweight and he didn’t climb to well and he finally huffed and puffed his way up there. He says, “Well, better splint this arms, looks like his arms are broken.” And I say, “Clyde he’s dead!” (Clyde) “Well, I’m not sure he’s dead.” I say “Clyde he’s dead!” I mean there was no question, I mean he was very well beat up. And well, I still had to splint one of this arms believe it or not. It’s the only time in my life I ever splinted a dead man. Well, it so happened that we had a seasonal Ranger that had come to us that summer, he’d been in the Paratroopers, I think. His wife had been an army nurse. And she had got there and she had been down on the road. So when we got him back down there, why she looked at him and said, “Why, he’s dead!” “Thank you!” So then, that was official that he was dead. I don’t know whether Clyde wouldn’t take my word for it or not.
