No, you may not go paddle boarding on Crater Lake/Rebecca Latson file

Cool, refreshing, incredibly deep blue water. That's how Crater Lake looks like from high up on the rim of the national park, and it's oh so enticing. Why not haul your paddle board or inflatible kayak down the Cleetwood Trail and cool off?

Well, because it's not permitted. What is allowed are swimming, wading, and fishing. 

But some, if not many, of this summer's visitors to Crater Lake National Park in southwestern Oregon might have been making their first visit to a national park during this coronavirus summer. So cooling off in the lake, or heading into the woods to relieve oneself, might seem natural. In short, these national park newcomers might not be attuned to how to conduct themselves in a national park setting.

"While it’s not true that every single person who comes to a national park recognizes and follows outdoor and public land etiquette, for the most part they do," Crater Lake Superintendent Craig Ackerman said Wednesday. "For the most part, our visitors are people who typically visit national parks, state parks, Forest Service recreation areas. But this year we’re seeing an influx of a lot of folks who aren’t your typical national park or public lands user. They’re folks who might have been at a swimming pool, a Disneyworld, Wet 'n' Wild water parks, a movie theater, whatever, and those are all closed. So their outlet now is to come to public lands and recreate."

That new set of park visitors, Ackerman guesses, is why there were some issues earlier this summer with visitor behavior. Complicating the problem, he went on, is that the park's reducing staffing levels, due not to funding issues but housing issues, has reduced interactions between rangers and visitors, and limited the number of rangers roving around the park. There's no staff in a visitor center to direct visitors to restrooms, or tell them what they can, and can't, do on the waters of big blue.

"So that’s why you end up having people carry inner tubes, lawnchairs, inflatable kayaks, paddle boards and the whole nine yards down to the lake, without some of them obviously not knowing that that was not OK," said Ackerman. Many, he guessed, simply thought, “Hey, it’s a lake, it’s a public land, let’s go down and recreate in it."

"As soon as we saw that developing, we shifted the limited staffing that we have from other areas to the lake, developed a checkpoint at the top of the (Cleetwood Cove) trailhead, (added) some presence down at the lakeshore, to try to prevent inappropriate behavior and educate people on what was appropriate, both for protecting the park and for themselves," the superintendent said.

The Woods Are Not Your Bathroom

Stopping visitors from turning the park's woods into bathrooms also took some education. The problem was largely twofold: With boat tours of Crater Lake canceled this summer due to Covid-19, park concessionaire Aramark was not manning a ticket booth at the parking lot that serves the Cleetwood Cove Trail that leads down to the dock, nor was it staffing the concession shack near the dock. Additionally, the park is struggling with just one custodian.

Under normal conditions, Ackerman said, the concession staff would “service the composting toilets that are on the Cleetwood shoreline. ... This year, due to the pandemic, we were unable to operate boat tours, so there’s absolutely no Aramark presence on the lakefront, which means there is no one there to daily service the composting toilets. Those composting toilets had to be closed so that they weren’t overfilled and created a hazard for life."

There are vault toilets at the top of the trail, he noted, but someone at the dock area would have to hike a mile back uphill, an elevational gain of 700 feet, to use them. Once a greater ranger presence was established within the Cleetwood Cove area, visitors became aware of the situation and use of the shoreline for bathrooms dropped considerably, as did attempts to take paddle boards, inner tubes, and inflatable boats down to the lake.

"Although we’ve picked up a couple instances of 'human deposits' somewhere along the lakeshore, that’s virtually disappeared since we had people out there talking to visitors and patrolling the trail and lakefront," he said.

At the National Parks Conservation Association, Northwest Regional Director Rob Smith said the problems indicate that visitors need to take greater personal responsibility when it comes to caring for Crater Lake and other national parks.

“National parks are for everyone, but to protect them for all to enjoy, everyone needs to visit responsibly," he said. "Keeping Crater Lake’s wildlife thriving and lake clear means every visitor needs to do their part.”

With no boat tours at Crater Lake this summer, you'll need a good lens for a closeup of Phantom Ship/Rebecca Latson file

Understaffed And Overwhelmed

While top Interior Department and Park Service officials want more visitor access made possible in national parks, that push can conflict with the fact that Crater Lake and other parks are understaffed, perhaps woefully, when it comes to handling the visitors. 

Due to directives from the Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Public Health Service, housing units that normally could accommodate three or four employees were essentially limited to two. As a result, not as many seasonal staff were brought back to many parks this year.

"The new requirements are one bathroom-bedroom combination per person. So right there, we have halved our available housing," said Ackerman. “We’re always in a critical shortage for housing anyway. The concessionaire is even worse because the majority of their housing is dormitory shared-housing. So you can imagine that their numbers can’t nearly approach what they have previously hired simply because of the housing inadequacy.

"I think that the concession staffing currently stands at about 93, instead of 250, and we’re scheduled to lose a significant number of those in the next two weeks," he said. "And the park staff was down around 85, 86, something like that, instead of 150. So with those kind of staffing numbers, it is impossible for us to staff various facilities or various contact points the way that we did in the past.”

Among the staffing shortages are custodians, the vital crews that clean the park's comfort stations.

“We currently have one custodian in the entire park," Ackerman said. While many people applied for the positions early this year and were accepted, many later withdrew due to the coronavirus pandemic, he explained. 

"We had two or three custodians accept and show up, and then work a day and then resign," said Ackerman. "One of them worked two hours and then resigned, and said, 'I’m not willing to do this all summer.' So we have the park’s entire load of visitor comfort stations trying to be maintained by one or two people. We even have our facility manager and chief of buildings and utilities out cleaning restrooms, which is not the best situation."

Probably also concerning is where Crater Lake's visitors are coming from. During a recent visit to Cleetwood Cove, the superintendent walked through the parking lot, and not only did he see little use of face masks -- "There were probably 100 people milling around, only four of which I saw had masks at the time." -- but he counted license plates from 25 states.

"A large number, surprisingly, from Texas, Arizona, and Florida," he said, noting that those states had some of the highest Covid-19 infection rates in the country. "I had at least seven or eight cars in there from Florida.”

Fortunately, so far, there have been no positive Covid-19 tests among park or concession staff, the superinendent said, then adding that he's surprised by that.

"When you get three-quarters of a million people coming in here from highly infected areas, even if you think there’s only a 1 percent infection rate, that means that we have 7,500 hundred infected people coming to the park,” said Ackerman.

Not surprising in this summer of Covid is that Ackerman admits to occasionally thinking ahead to when he can look at the summer of 2020 "through the rearview mirror."