Volume 5 No. 3 * Fall 2000
Page Five
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Friends of Volume 5 No. 3 * Fall 2000 Page Five |
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CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK - THEN, 1946-1950
We lived at Annie Spring for two years. The garage at the quarters was merely an attached lean-to open in the front which allowed the snow to blow in. Also, snow melted on the house roof and ran onto the garage roof and refroze. The melt also went through the cracks and refroze on the gravel floor. We shoveled snow and chipped ice for a month or so until it became an impossible task and finally left the car out the rest of the winter. One had to be very careful walking through the garage to get into the house, even though the ice was liberally salted down. The front door of the house was snowed in from about December on. I spent numerous hours on the roof of the garage chipping and shoveling to relieve the load so the roof didn't collapse. The gravel road into the house from the South Entrance road was about a couple hundred feet long and the early morning snow plow crew (4 a.m., that is) kept track of days off and plowed roads necessary for people to get out to go to town. One morning at about 6 a.m. on my day off we were very nudely awakened when a rotary snow plow hit the corner of our house only a very few feet from our bed. Fortunately, the only damage done was to our nervous systems. One really hasn't fully lived until such an occurrence!
During our entire tour at Crater Lake the Superintendent and the fiscal and personnel office moved to Medford immediately after Labor Day and returned to the park in early June. The Assistant Superintendent was assigned to Klamath Falls for public relations during the winter. The mechanics, plow operators, warehouse personnel and the ranger force remained in the park. We were often greeted in nearly disbelief by relatives and friends in Roseburg, or even in Klamath Falls or Medford, when they learned we lived and worked all year at Crater Lake. "Aren't you snowed in?" was the usual comment. And "What do you do in all that snow?" The truth is we were snowed in only one time in the four winters we were there and that was because the highways outside the park were snowed shut. Our plow operators had to go outside the park to help the State out. I don't think our operators could be beaten by anyone any place for efficient snow removal. We obtained our groceries, visited doctors, dentists, etc.... in Klamath Falls and seldom went to Medford as it was a little further and most every adult at Crater Lake was quite adept at putting on tire chains. Several of us formed a ski club and bought a ski tow, rope with engine, and during our tour had it on several different hills close to Headquarters. This was the first exposure to skiing that several of us had and we got to be at least intermediate skiers. The ranger force and the electrician and helpers got quite a bit of practice in cross country skiing. Power lines went down with regularity when wet snow caused them to break and manpower had to pull them out of the snow to be repaired. We did have a Tucker Snow-Cat, manufactured in Medford. This was an experimental model which had skis and wheels on the front and tracks on the back. Later models had tracks front and rear, which worked better in the conditions at Crater Lake. It did tend to throw the tracks in heavy snow. It also slid into the holes next to trees. Many trips included a lot of time digging out the Snow-Cat. Some folks can't stand long winters with copious amounts of snow, but during our tour at Crater Lake the employees and families were apparently very well adjusted. Several families were kept quite busy raising very small to school age children.
By our last two years at Crater Lake the ranger force had grown to a Chief, Assistant Chief, and two District Rangers. The Assistant Chief and his wife had two school age daughters, and along with two other school age children, were taught by the Assistant Chief's wife, Lucille Sneddon. A large room on the second floor of the Administration Building which at one time had been the Park Commissioner's was set up as a school room. There were also several younger children in the park and Mrs. Sneddon invited them to come for one hour for Kindergarten. The snow would stack up to the windows and at least one time the older girls slid out the windows and down to the parking lot below. The employees got together for square dancing a couple of times a month in the Administration Building during the winter months. The fiscal office and personnel office was one big room and with desks and file cabinets pushed back along the walls, there was room, just barely, for two squares. The Superintendent's office had a nice rug on the floor and babies and small children slept there while the grownups stomped a few feet away. Lou Hallock, the Chief Ranger, had several very good square records which we all enjoyed. The roads were patrolled usually twice a day to watch for errant travelers who could be in trouble on the snow and ice. It was not too unusual to find someone without tire chains with a vehicle stuck on a hill, usually on the west entrance road. Despite warnings that chains might be necessary or required a certain number of people felt they knew better than the Rangers who worked in the snow every day. We helped them, anyway. Several ski clubs from Klamath Falls and Medford set up rope ski tows on slopes usually near the rim and operated under special use permits, to try to take advantage of Crater Lake's copious snowfall and the increasing number of skiers. One of the commercial ventures was setup on the south of the Lodge affording beginner to intermediate ski slopes. Too much snow was the downfall of this operation. The operator and usually one helper would come up on Friday to dig the ropes out of the snow, move the engine up higher and do any other necessary maintenance. Approximately two thirds of the time that winter after all the work was done and the tow was ready to operate for the weekend, it would start to snow, and snow, and snow until the rope and tow were completely buried again. It usually stopped snowing so heavy by 10 a.m. or so on Saturday, but by the time the tow was ready to go again it was nearly time on Sunday to quit. And to add insult to injury it usually snowed very lightly until the next Friday night! As I recall, one season of fighting Crater Lake's snow was enough for that operator. The Rangers maintained a first aid station on the rim. Very few weekends went by that sprains or breaks of the lower extremities weren't taken care of. We had first aid training and refresher training each year before the winter season came on us. Several of the Rangers were qualified instructors. Fortunately, for the Park Visitor, a number of Ranger activities have become highly sophisticated since the 1940's. The care of injured skiers by highly trained E.M.T. Rangers is certainly and example.
After two years of living at Annie Spring, we moved to a small rock house near Headquarters, also a product of the C.C.C.'s. There were, and still are, three small rock houses in a row. We had the middle one, with the Warehouse Man on one side and the Chief Mechanic on the other. We added another son to the family while we lived there. The snow really piled up around these houses, covering the upstairs windows. The snow melted away from the first floor windows, forming quite a cave. A pair of Pine Marten would entertain us at night by running around and peering in our windows lit by the inside lamps.
Our household had an abundance of cloth diapers to wash and dry. Clothes dryers were virtually unheard of. To remedy this a pulley was installed on a big Red Fir tree away from the house and another on a window sill on the second floor, with a cloths line rope between them making a loop. A similar line was installed between our house and the next door house. Jean and the neighbor took turns with that line. Laundry hung on the lines would freeze in a very few minutes, taking the moisture out. That is the way to get sweet smelling clothes. Several times I had to shovel snow away from the second story so the pulley system would operate. Later, there was just too much snow, and we resorted to lines strung across the living room. Usually about March the snow would get heavy enough on the houses and the other buildings that some snow had to be removed. Since the snow was usually deep enough that there was no place to put it, a Cat was used to dig a trench behind the houses and the roof snow was shoveled into that. This was an all hands operation and just about all able bodied personnel used shovels. My good wife suggests that since I'm just about 80 years old, perhaps my memory of some details of the late 1940's is a bit cloudy at times. She's probably right, but who is gonna argue with me! This article is in tribute to Jean Howe. Together with her husband, Wayne, they composed this account of their life at Crater Lake National Park. Jean died November 9, 2000. |
