Rex Trulove
This is the one image that isn’t from Glacier National Park. This is Crater Lake headquarters, about three miles from the rim that overlooks the lake. This is early in the snow season, so the snow is only about four feet deep here.
For those who wondered, Crater Lake National Park is about 568 miles, in a straight line, from Glacier National Park. It is about 711 miles by road.
The location of the camera is the apex of the Visitor’s Center, which was the park administration building when I lived there, so many years ago. It was also the location of our post office when I was there, and it is where I went to school during the first, second, and third grades. The school was in one of the conference rooms; one room for grades 1-6. Yes, I did go to school in a one-room school. There were fewer than 15 students.
To the right, just out of the frame, is the road that winds up Superintendent’s Hill, where the large houses were for the superintendent and assistant superintendent and their families. Those houses were very nice, yet the last person to live in either of them, to my knowledge, was a superintendent at the park in 1968. All the rest have lived in Medford, Oregon, about 60 miles away and outside of the park and the houses have remained vacant.
The building on the right used to be the ranger dorm, which was only used in the summer. The tiny building standing by itself in the distance is the old sign shop and carpentry shop. The heavy equipment shops are out of sight, beyond the sign shop.
In case you wondered, the poles that you can see are snow poles. These used to just be lodgepole pine poles, but they started using plastic ones a few decades ago. The purpose is to let the plow operators know where the edge of the road is. That way, they don’t accidentally destroy something that they shouldn’t, in the process of plowing the road. As kids, we used them for a different purpose; to scale the 15-20 foot snowbanks that are eventually there.
I strongly suspect that all of these views will look quite a bit different in a week.
Now I know what snow poles are. Love that sky as well.
In my youth, the poles were as tall but barely reached above the snow banks.