When Deer Took Over Crater Lake Lodge
And other true tales from my summer on the rim
I lived three summers in Crater Lake National Park, one as an employee for the Park Concession, and two as a ranger for the National Park Service. Here are memories from that first magical summer.
In the summer of 1980, I accepted a job as the night front desk clerk at Crater Lake Lodge in Southern Oregon. Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and was formed when volcanic Mt. Mazama collapsed more than 7500 years ago. The lodge, which is perched on the rim of a giant caldera, opened in 1915, when travel to national parks was largely a horse and buggy affair for wealthy adventurers.
That summer I was part of the crew hired by Canteen, which was the concessionaire that held the exclusive right to operate guest facilities throughout the Park. Because of the high altitude and extreme weather conditions at the rim, Crater Lake Lodge was open in those years from early June to early September. When I arrived for my summer job, snow drifts were still deep and heavy; the next season of snow would come again before I left in September to return to school.
My room was on the fourth floor, an attic-like space with rooms on each side of the hallway. Over 65 years, the lodge had deteriorated and was caving in on itself. Steel cables stretched from north to south across my attic room. The cables were in place to stabilize the building and yet my room was on a pitch. If I set a bottle on its side near the door into the hallway, it would quickly roll to the other side of the room. I thought it quirky and didn’t worry about the danger.
My hallmates were all college students like me, recruited in the Winter and Spring from around the United States. All of us living in the lodge worked in the lodge — as cooks, as housekeepers, as bellhops, as dining room staff. We ate our meals in a cafeteria that was in the day-lodge facilities for daily park guests and campers who stayed in the valley below the rim. The meals were factored into our compensation, and none of the staff I knew had money or time to leave the Park.
My job was to staff the lodge front desk from 11 pm to 7 in the morning. Most nights, the only people awake through the late night hours were the night watchman, an 18-year-old from the tiny town of Burns, Oregon, and myself. Nights were often quiet and still, sometimes with the beautiful glow of a huge moon hanging over the rim.
Because the nights were long and we were often tired, Mike and I would pass time by making up stories about the guests in the lodge. Back then, each room had two keys, one of which we gave to the guest, and one which we kept in tiny key-sized cubbies on the back wall of the front desk. To relieve the boredom, Mike would toss a wad of paper into one of the keyholes and I would tell him, in my best game show voice, which guest he’d won. I would read the guests’ names and where they lived from the paper portfolio the guest had filled out upon arrival; the rest I made up. “Tonight, you have won Grace and Patrick O’Sullivan, from Dingle, Ireland. She is a fabulous cook who made her fortune selling potato muffins, and Patrick is the youngest son of the Dingle parish priest.”
Many of our guests were European, and their Circadian rhythms were often out of whack, which meant they sometimes would wander down the stairs looking for something to do or someone to pass the time with.
In an era when none of the rooms had telephones or TVs or noisemaking devices of any kind, Mike and I loved entertaining sleepless guests, sometimes telling them deliberately tall tales about the bears or the lake or the history of the park. Every half hour, Mike would turn on his flashlight and steel himself to begin his rounds, which involved a perimeter check, a walk through the basement kitchen storage area (once a bear had wandered down there), and a stroll through the parking lot, which he happily admitted was harder on very dark nights, and not helped by all the bear stories we told.
One night, two wide awake German guests came downstairs. The day had been uncharacteristically hot and the lodge had no air conditioning, so Mike had thrown open the French doors in the great room that opened to the stone patio on the lake side. The fresh air was a welcome delight.
In the great room was a massive fireplace, lodge-style furniture, and a small unwalled gift shop that carried small souvenirs and candy. On the other side of the great room, opposite the front desk area and the main entrance, was a beautiful dining room, where breakfast and dinner were served each day, mostly to lodge guests. That night all of the rooms were full and we weren’t expecting additional visitors.
In the middle of our chat with the sleepless European guests, Mike and I, almost in tandem, noticed that six adult deer, two with huge racks, had walked in through the open patio doors. We were wide-eyed, but didn’t want to alarm the guests. The deer were in an exploratory mood, checking out the furniture and especially the candy which hung on wire racks near the cashier station in the gift shop area. I was thinking about sharp hooves, sharp antlers, and panicked deer, when one of the guests said, “They’re so pretty. Do they do this every night?”
Mike looked at me, wild-eyed, and then dove in. “They’re early tonight. Usually, they don’t come until much later.” Meanwhile, the guests are staring at the deer, and Mike and I are looking at each other, each of us yelling silently that things could soon get very, very bad.
An ounce of maturity kicked in. “We try to be very quiet when they’re here,” I whispered, “just because it’s so peaceful and we don’t like to disturb them.”
By this time, I’m noticing that one of the deer is completely fixated on the gift shop candy, trying to figure out a way to nibble it out of its packaging. The other deer have spread out across the lobby. At the slightest sound — the floor creaking overhead or something rustling outside, all the deer would freeze. Once the noise passed, the deer were back to sniffing and exploring, and trying to snack.
After several minutes, with three candy bags on the floor but none of the contents spilled, the would-be snacker deer gave up, and headed towards the open patio doors. The other deer soon followed, all moving quietly. When the last deer was out the door, Mike ran over, shut the doors, and secured the latch.
My heart was just starting to slow, when I heard the German-accent again. “What time do you think they’ll come tomorrow?”
A few weeks into the summer season, some of my new friends in the dining room suggested I work some shifts waiting tables. They all pooled tips, and as a group had figured out that they’d make more money if guests had a fabulous entertainment experience, served alongside the mediocre institutional food.
The lodge chef was a heavy drinker, who would show up just after food was prepped, look over a few things, and then begin throwing back alcohol. Several times, he passed out in the middle of the kitchen floor, and we’d step over him or walk around him as we quickly moved plates from cook line to tables. Because Chef was typically done for by 6:30 pm, the college students ran the show. Each night, it felt like we were putting on a Broadway show without a director.
One of the servers, John, took over sommelier duties, where he’d use words like “beige” or “incandescent” to describe various wines that he knew almost nothing about. The guests were typically in a happy, generous mood, and loved that the staff was earning money for college. We learned quickly that when two couples dined together, they’d often race for the check, and the most lucrative path was to say, “Why doesn’t one of you get the dinner and the other get the tip?” More often than not, the battle for equity resulted in very generous tips.
One of the favorite dishes at the lodge was beef burgundy, served over noodles. We always called it “Chef’s Special Beef Burgundy” but the truth is it came from a frozen large institutional-sized Stouffer’s bag. Served in a gorgeous setting, visitors loved it and often begged for the recipe. Another favorite dish was canned blueberries, served on prepackaged crepes, with a generous dollop of canister whipped cream. After a day on the road or on the hiking trails, guests loved whatever was served in the spectacular setting of Crater Lake.
Sometimes, I worked breakfast and dinner shifts, which meant the only time I had to sleep, given my overnight job, was mid-day. Once, when I was working the evening shift, a family came in that I’d served earlier on the breakfast shift. They specifically asked for me, I suspected because at breakfast I’d recommended they try fishing in the lake. Beginning in 1888 and lasting til 1941, Kokanee salmon and rainbow trout were stocked into the lake, which by 1980 the National Park Service considered invasive species. Visitors were encouraged to fish them out.
The Mom of the family was beside herself. She’d caught a beautiful rainbow trout, which she’d brought with her for the kitchen staff to cook up. We loved it when guests brought in their catch. It was exciting for them and fun for everyone around. Part of the joy came from the sheer effort involved to catch the fish, which included a steep switchback hike down the caldera’s 1.1 mile Cleetwood Cove Trail, and what felt like an 11-mile hike back up the same path.
After taking the family’s dinner orders, I tapped a fork to a glass and made an announcement to the entire dining room. “Let’s celebrate Sandra Smith*, from Boston, Massachusetts, who caught a beautiful rainbow trout in Crater Lake today, which we’ll be serving up as her dinner tonight.” Broad smiles and enthusiastic applause soon followed.
When the other family members at her table had been served, I brought out Mrs. Smith’s beautiful trout. My job was to debone it, and open it up, so that two halves lay nicely on the plate. Because of the earlier applause, I felt the eyes of the entire dining room on me. I carefully nudged the deboning knife in, then, because of my nerves, the cooked fish jumped up and dove firmly below table height. The dining room was stunned and quiet as I reached into Mrs. Smith’s lap to retrieve the fish. I felt all eyes again as I carried the trout off, then walked it through the kitchen to refresh it and the plate, only to serve it all over again.
Most of us working in and around the rim that summer did not make much money per hour. The tip-based jobs paid much better. Bellhops who carried luggage up and down the three guest floors did well. One of the bellhops I became friendly with was David, whose dad had died in Vietnam. David was so friendly and engaging that visitors loved to give him huge tips.
There were no elevators, the rim’s altitude was above 7,000 feet, and our guests were often tired from a long drive, which meant that everyone trudged up the stairs after check-in. About half of the guests would then walk back down, and ask for a better room. Whoever was on duty had to tell them that most rooms, including the two-room honeymoon suite, did not have a private bathroom. The bathrooms for Gentlemen and Ladies were down the hall, and if you needed to make a call, a payphone in the lobby was your only option. If you wanted a better room, your night’s sleep could be hours away.
Generally speaking, Europeans were comfortable and fine with the accommodations, while U.S. visitors used to four-star resorts were sometimes not. The beauty of the setting was incomparable, and for visitors who liked to hike and explore, a day or two on the rim was magical.
For those of us lucky enough to live in the lodge, life was magical too. We all worked hard and played hard. I probably picked up six or seven dining room shifts a week, in addition to my six-night-a-week job. On the one day I had off completely, I’d often go on a hike with whoever else was off that day. But sometimes I just slept. I never really got used to my overnight shifts, in large part because I found it so hard to sleep when everyone else was buzzing around.
In addition to the hiking and outdoor play, being part of a college crew that gathered for summers only meant lots of summer romances and intense friendships. In the days before Facebook, cell phones, or any social media, the relationships we built grew intensely over the summer weeks, and then withered away once cold weather set in and we all splintered off to different schools.
Because Mt. St. Helens in Washington State had erupted on May 18th of that year, over the summer, and depending on the winds, ash would drift and sprinkle down, reminding us all of the volcanic danger we lived with every day. In 2018, Crater Lake was ranked the 17th most dangerous volcanic area in the United States.
Many years after my summer in the lodge, Crater Lake Lodge was condemned and then dismantled and built completely anew, using some of the old materials, further back from the rim. Most people romanticized the original lodge thinking it must be of similar quality to the beloved Timberline Lodge at Mt. Hood, which had been built during the Depression and was an extraordinary example of Works Progress Administration craftsmanship. Over time, though, as I lived on the rim, I realized that the original lodge, which had endured heavy winters since 1915, had become a beleaguered firetrap. The new lodge looks almost exactly like the original, and is much better built. To accommodate the upgrades that turned it into a modern building, guest capacity was reduced by about a third.
Ultimately, my summer at the rim set me on a wonderful path. In subsequent summers, I was hired by the National Park Service and served as a ranger complete with a Smokey the Bear hat I still cherish. The last time I visited the park, the lodge staff was far beyond college-age, which made me sad for all of the university students today who aren’t able to experience their own magic summer on the rim.
*I can’t remember what Sandra Smith’s name actually was.
