Jerry Davis
Interviewer April Bernard

September 18, 2002

First thing that we’re going to start with is the biographical data sheet.  We can start on that and then I may go back and make sure our voices are coming across okay. 

What is your full name?

Gerald Neal Davis. 

And your address?

Box 25 Fairplay. 

What’s the zip code?

80440

What is your date of birth?

7/11/39

Where were you born?

Fort Collins

Ethnic or cultural group?

I guess I’m a WASP

What does that mean?

White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, your all-American.

Names and occupations of parents?

Harry Buffam Davis.

What did he do?

He was a teacher, administrator, coach.

What was your mother’s name?

Adalyn Viola Davis (Hiatt).

What did she do?

Homemaker.

Others who helped raise you?

None

And the names of your grandparents?

Orace W. ?  Davis

And your grandma’s name?

She died early.  I’m spacing that–I can’t remember it.

How about siblings?

Donald Glenn Davis.

What are the grandparents on your mom’s side?

Harry Elliott Hiatt.

And your grandma?

Viola (can’t remember middle initial) Bartholomew.

And names of spouses.

No spouse

Children?

Not any that I knew.

Friends or other persons significant in your life?

None that stands out right now. 

Places that you have lived during your lifetime?

In chronological order?  Fort Collins, where I was born.  Holly, Colorado.  A summer or two in Manitou Springs.  Globe, Arizona.  Eugene, Oregon.  Los Animas.  The Fort Collins again.  Then Fairplay.  Colorado Springs.  Oh, yeah, Timnath, Colorado.

The reason for some of this interview is the connections with the forest service.  How did you come to work for the forest service?

I started in 1958, which was the summer of my freshman year in college.  So it was just a summer job situation there.  And I worked all the way through college.  Even after that I was a temporary for a long time.  And I got permanent employment in 1971.

It took awhile then?

It did then.  It’s not as bad now, quite.  But it’s still pretty bad.  They just kind of rely on people coming back year after year.  A lot of people do.  Even still.  It was a long process to get permanent employment. 

What kind of position did you start out in?

Just whatever was to be done.  Cleaning campgrounds and fixing fences.  Clearing trails.  Most of it was recreation.  Campground clean-up.  That was most of what we did.

So when you received permanent employment were you doing something different?

Not really that much.  Even before that I had evolved into doing public contact work with the recreation stuff, not just the cleanup and all.  I spent a lot of weekends herding people around Emerson Lake.  That was a tough job really.

What made it tough?

It gives you an understanding a lot of what cops do because you’re always dealing with negatives.  You’re trying to correct somebody who’s not doing what they’re supposed to.  So it’s sort of a dime store law enforcement situation.  But I hated that in some ways.  Having to do that involved writing tickets and that sort of thing.  That’s tough work for me.  I just don’t like the negativity of it.  Because that’s all it is.  It’s a lot like a city cop would be.  Most of the time that you spend interacting with people is negative, because you’re interacting with someone who’s not happy with what you’re doing.  And you’re having to correct them when they’re doing something that might kind of annoy you, too.  I guess it was a necessary job, but a hard one.  One that the forest service doesn’t always do real well.  In fact that’s one of the things that I think they made a mistake on sometimes.   A lot of the forest service folks tended to withdraw from that.  A lot of the stuff now is turned over to a concessionaire, and not have to deal with stuff like that.  Some of the management level folks in the forest service didn’t like any part of that.  They just don’t like to deal with people problems.  That’s a human frailty, I guess.

Is it still that way or has it changed?

It would depend sometimes on the orientation of some of the people in charge.  Some of them didn’t want anything to stir up the waters.  There were a few that didn’t want to take a ?, they didn’t want any congressionals coming back or anything like.  They just wanted to sweep things under the rug and be Mister Nice Guy.  But when it came time to really enforce something, they wouldn’t do it.  That made it very hard for people in the field, because you didn’t really have anything to back you up.  If you told this guy he can’t camp here at night and he tells you to go away or he’ll shoot you.  That’s pretty hard to stand still for things like that.  But we had some periods like that.  They were pretty tough. 

What do you think the dates are for periods like that?

It was kind of off and on, I suppose.  Probably latter sixties, maybe early seventies.  There were times when law enforcement was emphasized more than other times.  On any level, if you’re going to have rules, you have to enforce them, or else you’re taking the people who obey the rules for granted and ignoring the people who don’t, and that’s real hard on the credibility of the outfit.

How long did you work for the forest service–when did you retire?

1994

So then just throughout your career there were ups and downs, but just during the sixties and seventies you experienced that?

I got out of the business eventually, but as far as actually being out there enforcing, I didn’t do much of that.  But there were people who did, still.  There was still some of that up until we went into the concession business.

When was that?

I guess about the time I retired, or maybe a little before that.

Do you remember a specific instance with a person like the one who offered to shoot you?

That particular individual was just a loudmouth, which made it even more irritating.  I’ve forgotten exactly what he said, but something to the effect that if you bother me again I’ll shoot you.  Which I didn’t take all that seriously.  But things like that really burn you because people like that shouldn’t be allowed to get away with stuff like that.  He should have had a deputy on his doorstep in about two shakes.  One of those that kind of galled me when I was in enforcement. 

So you eventually got of enforcing, what did you do then?

A lot of different things, I guess, but I did quite a bit of trail layout and got into the cultural resource stuff.  I spent quite a lot of time on that the last few years. 

Doing survey?

Yes, I helped the archaeologist with some of his stuff.  And his assistant.  I did some of the stuff in collaboration with them and some stuff I did on my own.  Some of the stuff before Al got there, I did on my own and was kind of stumbling around learning how to do it.  After Al came things got professionalized quite a bit more, I think.  And Bill Buckles was there for one summer, I think, before Al came.  He was with USC in Southern Colorado.  He’s doing a lot of writing, and so on.  I think he’s retired now, but he still keeps his hand in.  He professionalized things a little bit, at least for one summer there.  Then Al came in and it got a little bit more so.  I don’t know percentage-wise how that would go.  But there was a fair amount of time spent on cultural resource.  And just because I’d been around so long, I was the designated researcher for anything on the district that needed to be looked up. Right-of-ways or any kind of thing like that that required research.  I always got the job because I did know my way around county records.

Were you with Pike National Forest?

Just Fairplay.  Which was almost unique, I guess.

Why was that?

Most people moved around to some extent.  Even the non-professionals, there were a few, which I was, that stayed around a place for quite a while.  Steve Ested of Bailey is the only other one I can think of that stayed his whole career in one place.

Is there a reason for that?

The organization is geared to moving around, certainly with the professional grade, and to some of the lower grades, to some extent.  It’s a situation where, if you’re not willing to move in the forest service, you’re not going anywhere in terms of going up the ladder.  There’s an emphasis on, I guess you could call it breadth of experience or something, that you supposedly gain by moving around.  I think that’s true to an extent, but you lose a lot to an extent, too.  People come in and just get to where they remember the combination to their post office box and then they’re gone somewhere else.  Some things really suffer because of that.  I think continuity is worse now than it’s ever been, because there’s no institutional memory. 

What do you mean by that?

The organization, whether at a district level or whatever, has no memory because the turnover is so great.  Nobody knows what went on three or four years ago in some cases.  It used to be that people like me or even the district clerks, probably more so, back in the old days they are the ones who had the most tenure on the average.  They knew everything.  They did all the typing and they knew everything that was going on.  Just kind of like in any office, here’s old Suzy Secretary who actually runs the joint.  And nobody knows it, what she does.  A lot of people know it but they wouldn’t admit it.  But you have some of these competent secretarial level people who know what’s going on far more than anybody else.  I think that was true a lot in the forest service.  But now a lot is changed because of computers; everybody pretty much does their own correspondence and you don’t have it funneling through somebody like that any more.  And also the clerical is compartmentalized now.  You have a resource clerk and a personnel clerk and somebody else who does something else.  So there’s no overall memory again.  No continuity.  I think it’s really hard to have the continuity or the memory when there’s so much turnover and because the organization has gotten so much bigger.  It functions way differently than it used to.  And there really is definitely something lost there.  And I don’t know how to get it back with that type of organization because nobody now can have a hand on everything that goes on.  The closest that anybody comes to it now would be at the ranger level.  Because that’s the person that has the umbrella a little bit over everything.  He has the range staff and the reg staff and this or that staff under him or her.  But that person is the one that has probably the best grasp over what’s going on or should.  But again there’s so much turnover there that the memory and the continuity really suffer.  It’s a difficult business because things are so much more complex. A lot of stuff just gets lost, and I’m disappointed in that, but it’s gone away deliberately because nobody knows or cares what that old stuff goes.  And it’s a real shame when that kind of thing happens when it does.  Of course the cultural resource man leaves the work there years ago and to an extent that helps a little bit to sort of keep track of things I suppose.  But it’s really tough to keep up with stuff that went on years ago.  They call me all the time asking about this or that or some person nobody knows anything about.  Somebody was in a big battle fifteen or twenty years and nobody remembers it now, then it resurfaces and nobody has any memory of what went on.  That can really cause some difficulties sometimes.  Some people have exploited that over the years, too.  Some of the bad guys, so-to-speak, will keep taking a run at old Smokey every so often, because here’s a new guy coming so I’ll have a shot at him and see if I can get away with what I want to get away with that the last guy didn’t let me get away with.  But the turnover allows stuff like that to go on, too, people who don’t have the best of motives, sometimes.

Can you remember a particular situation where that has occurred?

Some of the mining claim things have been difficulties of that kind.  Blanket statements about mining claims–telling people they can build houses on them.  That sort of thing has gone on over the years.  People will come in sometimes and try again.  The range business has that angle too, because the ranchers will test the new guy.  If there’s a new range guy they’ll try him on for size.  That’s another one of the weaknesses in the continuity, especially with the ranchers.

Tape one, side two

You were saying something about the ranchers.

The ranchers are such long term people.  They like to be able to get some guy broken in and work with him over a period of years.  And I think some of them have found it frustrating to have to relate to new people coming in.  Because that’s not their thing.  They’ve been there for four hundred years and so have their neighbors and most all of their relationships are long-term type things.  I think it’s frustrated them a little bit over the years having to have such short-term relationships with forest service people changing all the time.

Has that led to ill feeling?

Sure, it depends on the personality and on the forest service person sometimes if its some hard-nose type that’s going to be laying down the law, why, of course there’s resentment of that sort of thing.  Most of the range people know what they’re working with, too, and they make allowances accordingly.  Because they realize what kind of folks the ranchers are and how you have to deal with them.  So by and large I think they do fairly well, probably better now for the most part than they did over the years.  That’s been a decades, generations long process to establish the forest service as far as grazing goes.  Because that was a real battle in the beginning, those old boys weren’t going to be told anything.  They were going to turn as many cows on there as they could get away with, they’d been doing it for years and they sure didn’t like the forest service coming in there and telling them what to do.  It took years and years and years and years to get the numbers cut down to where there was a sustainable resource.  It took a long time.

When do you think that initial clash took place, struggle for cutting the numbers of cattle?

It started long before the forest service.  It really started when the general land office people, this goes clear back probably to the 1880's when they first started out and went after some of these guys for fencing the public domain.  You’d get some old boy backed up to a mountain somewhere and he’d strategically arrange his fences so he had a whole chunk of country fenced.  It was totally illegal, but he had all this country and he’d be controlling it and the government finally got after that and prosecuted a bunch of these people for illegally fencing the public domain and they just kind of went on from there, again before the forest service, the interior department people, the general land office again, the special agents, they called them back then, did some stuff on grazing abuses–more timber than grazing, actually, but they did some grazing stuff about the turn of the century, the first rangers were interior department people and they had some of the real tough stuff on grazing, then they transitioned over to the forest service and the forest service took up where they had left off.  And they just kind of went on down the line and they would take what they could get over the years.  And they kept on establishing authority until eventually they pretty much got the job done and got the numbers cut down to where the resource could hang in there, and you could have some kind of a sustainable resource.  It was an interesting process.

Were you there for part of that?

No (laughing), I’m not that ancient.  But that’s the kind of stuff you find out in the cultural resource field.  It was sort of an evolution.  The timber was the same thing, if anything it might have been even tougher, because those guys were more outlaws, the early timber operators, than the ranchers were, because they were transients.  They would just move in and do their thing and hack everything down and move on.  The ranchers were more stable so they, I guess, in terms of being labbernakers?? I think the timber operators were more inclined that way than the ranchers were.

When did the timber stuff come down–did that happen before you left or were they still trying to adjust that?

I’d say things were pretty well under control long before that.  I’m not sure but what the timber got under control maybe even sooner than the grazing stuff did, because the timber operators would do their thing and move on, but you still had to do battle with the same people on the grazing stuff, so it took longer.  But once you won your timber battle they would move on and go somewhere else and then before the next round the forest service could establish itself a little more.  I could be wrong about that, but that’s my impression, once they got to work on it, it might have taken less time to get control over the timber stuff than other things.  Some places they never have.  Especially with grazing.  I’d be interested in finding out exactly why it was so different in Utah and Nevada are still bad.  They’ve got some nasty people out there that aren’t going to sit still for Smoky Bear.  They’d bomb offices in places in Nevada.  You’d have these old county commissioners out there in Utah and Nevada that would take their cat out there and decide this is our road and I’m going to maintain it whether you like it or not.  The attitudes out there are still a lot worse than they are here, I think.  I’m not sure why, I wish I knew.  If it was the forest service’s fault maybe for not establishing itself or if the people out there are just meaner and nastier.  I don’t know.  There are some real nasty people out there still.

Were there some issues that were similar to the timber and ranching that occurred while you were with the forest service, like recreation folks, that took up a lot of time?

All of it went on the same path to an extent, because the more recreation use you had, the more it had to be regulated.  And of course that made it a lot more difficult to work with the people.  A hundred years ago nobody would have thought of saying boo to somebody to stop camping somewhere.  But when you have a zillion people that are now camping up in the same drainage it’s time to do things.  You have to have the off-road travel rigs to keep people from tearing up the country.  And various fire things.  At a certain point you have to have developed campgrounds, which is in part a fire safety thing.  Just a matter of the land being able to sustain and support things.  If you have a campground, which is kind of a semi-hardened situation, concentrating people in an area that will take a beating.  If the campgrounds are located right, properly, instead of on a hillside or right next to a stream, you can sustain the resource a heck of a lot better than if you just let people go out there willy-nilly and camp right next to streams and camp in a desirable place that everybody likes and just beat it to death by overuse.  So everything has kind of happened that way.  The mining, there was a lot of difficulty with that.  We had no control over that until within my--in the 70's probably–we finally got surface management regulations on mining to where we were able to require people to have operating permits to do surface disturbance type stuff on the mining claims.  That took a little doing, too, to get that stuff established, because we had people that were used to just going out there and doing their thing, literally taking the cat out there and doing their assessment work and we hadn’t much to say because the 272-90 had us beat there.  It required assessment work and we didn’t have any regulations on controlling the way it was done.  They could just take a cat and doze a ditch down the hill and there wasn’t much we could do.  Then the surface management regs came in, and that cat might be doing its thing on a contour rather than right straight down a hill somewhere.  Things like that, just a whole realm of forest service work got a lot more complex because there were so many more demands, because there were so many more people and so much more going on out there.

So you saw the arrival of some of that complexity when you were dealing with a lot more recreation and a lot of money?

There was a big infusion of recreation money in about ‘62 or so.  In the mid-60's there was a real big push of campground construction.  That’s when most of the current campgrounds were built.  The old campgrounds just had grates, usually there’d be a cement block grate there, to take care of the fire safety aspect of things.  But we’d just have the old wooden tables, not tied down or anything.  And a couple of one-holers, with inspired names like Campground #2, or something like that.  Jefferson Creek would be a good case in point, we had all numbered campgrounds up there and only one with a name.  In the ‘60's they came in and built all these, a forest construction crew came in and built all these new campgrounds with way more units.  A multiple campground might have 35 units and something like that was just unheard of.  Before that a campground might have three units or five units or a big one might have maybe ten camping units.  That was a real big change in the early ‘60's when the more concentrated campgrounds were built.  These little old number ones, twos and threes were taken out. 

So they were actually removed to put in larger units?

Yeah, they weren’t as efficient in some ways, either, because with less units, the economies of scale weren’t as good as far as cleaning them up and so on.  Of course, it gets a little frustrating in a way, because you have a big place like that to clean up now, and lot of trash and a lot of ashes and a lot of this and that to take care of, but it certainly is more efficient.  If you have people scattered all over the countryside, you just couldn’t cope with it.  You just couldn’t do it.  Now there’s still disbursed recreation, but most of it is in the campgrounds.  The disbursed stuff is a problem, because of things like fire danger and whatnot.  And some of the people that abuse the off-road vehicle stuff.  That kind of thing is what goes on in disbursed areas.  But there has really been a tremendous change in recreation, just a quantum leap as far as use goes, after those new campgrounds went in there was a great increase in the number of people that used them.  They were out there and they started filling them up then.  In terms of units, I don’t know how many camping units we had at least in a place like Jefferson Creek before that–maybe no more than twenty-five at most, probably not that many.  In the whole drainage you had more of that than campground.  The construction push made a huge change.  Everything else has just all gotten tremendously complex.  A few years ago, Ray Johnson, who was my first ranger, his wife donated an old forest manual.  It’s something like two inches thick, maybe two and a half.  That was the forest service manual from 1923.  Now between the manual and all the handbooks, I bet you’d fill a bookshelf fifteen to twenty feet long.  That’s a very good illustration of how the complexity has changed.  This goes from just two books to what’s there now.  It’s just real basic, biblical stuff, that got handed down to successors from that old manual.  Now everything has evolved into legalisms and lawyers, and that made it as complex as anything else, the fact that we have turned into such a litigious society.  The whole bookshelf of manuals has to do with that.  Things were a whole lot simpler that way back then.

What were some of the simple guidelines that were laid down when you first came?

I guess, I don’t know if that changed all that much, but it just got so much more complex because there were so many more people.  The basic tenets have not changed all that much–the greatest good for the greatest number, or words to that effect.  Some of that stuff, sort of mission statement type stuff is still in the manual. There’s still a forest service mission statement and it is not hugely different than back then, it’s just that life is just a lot more complicated.  You have people yanking at you from all different directions.  Any government type manager has a tough row to hoe, just because you have people–I guess you could say Old Smoky’s got a guy with a pit bull on either side of him and there’s a guy there who thinks that if he doesn’t get after you everybody’s going to be out there hacking down all the trees and running his ATV to the top of the mountain and his pit bull is chewing on your pants leg and he’s pulling on one arm, and on the other side of you is the guy who does want to go to the top of the mountain and doesn’t want to hack everything down and his pit bull is chewing on the other leg and he’s yanking on the other arm just as hard as he can.  It’s pretty hard to go forward when you’re in that situation.  It makes it really tough because of the competing demands and the competing philosophies that are out there in the public now that were asserting themselves then.  Actually the resource user types were asserting themselves a heck of a lot more in the old days, but the tree-huggers have come on pretty strong now and they’re just as strong or stronger than the folks on the other side.  But they’re still both yanking as hard as they can on you and chewing on the legs from either side.  And when they do that it makes it hard to do anything.  They’re each trying to pull you their way and it makes it hard for you to move ahead and go down the middle. 

Towards the end of your tenure, did folks start to come forward who wanted to save the resources?

That’s something that’s changed a lot within the forest service.  A lot of the younger people are much more environmentally minded now than they used to be.  And the organization has shown that over the years.  The forest service people, a lot of them were what we called ‘timber-beasts’, that was their main mission in life was to get out there and get those trees marked and administer timber sales.  Back in the simpler days there were a lot of people that had that orientation and there was some resistance even within the forest service that fought evolution because there were those old ‘moss-backs’ who felt that it was their mission to make timber sales and they wanted to be bothered with as little else as possible.  Those people are long gone for the most part.  There are still a few closet ones out there who are like, but that’s changed now just because the pressure has changed so much.  The consciousness has changed.  There wasn’t a wholesale assault on the resources even back when the timber people and the grazing people were more dominant.  People still lose track of the fact that some of the more radical environmentalists, for want of a better word, view Smoky as being in bed with the capitalist pigs who are out there wanting to hack down all the timber.  But what Smoky needs to do is to get out there and show people the land.  Because the land has been a dramatic amount of ?hewing since the forest service has been in business.  They won’t get anywhere near enough credit for that.  To some of these wacko types out there saying that we’re in bed with the multi-national corporate brigands–there is that, but it’s the way these pressure groups look at things.  You’ve got the guy on one side thinking that you’re in league with the devil and you’ve got the guy on the other side who thinks you’re caving in to the Sierra Club all the time.  And there you are, right there in the middle.  And I’m not sure we’ve done as good a job as we could over the years making our case.  In fact, that’s one of my little pet peeves, where we dropped the ball, is something called the camera points program where camera points were established where we might have an old 1898 photo and that point is identified.  People would go back there every ten years or twenty years, and we were supposed to be taking the same picture again over a period over all those decades and years.  Some really showed progress as far as healing the lands goes.  That’s just gotten dropped because it isn’t the crisis of the day.  It’s just gotten to where you respond to the crisis of the day all the time, something that’s nipping at your heels.  That camera point program is something I’d like to see re-established.  Because I think it would do the forest service a lot of good demonstrating, you can use all the words you want, but if you put two pictures side by side showing the difference between something that was denuded a hundred years ago when the forest service first got a hold of it and it’s in great shape now, it really could make a difference.  That’s one of my little things.  I’d like to see some of that stuff done again. Maybe even establish some more areas.  In the county archives when we’re finding these old photos, if we find some old ones that are appropriate to retake now that would show the effects of resource conservation, I think that would be real profitable to do.  You need to set up a grant program for that.  You can’t devote your life to go out and retake ancient photos.  But I’d like to see that get done.  I think it’s still supposed to be done, but as far as I know I’m not in touch with anybody who is still keeping up with that.  It would be hard to even to get out there and find the camera points, probably.  But they even put in brass caps and everything, where they’re supposed to be.

Are those brass caps still there?

Yeah, some of them at least.  You’d just have to go out there with your camera.

Are there other programs that the department of the interior had that might have used interns?

We used to do some things, they had ambitious things once in a while like counting recreation use, to try to get accurate figures reporting recreation use.  That’s pretty much down the tubes now.  Back in the sixties I’d take my personal car out and just sit at a given campground for a period of time and record all the comings and goings, how many people were in each vehicle.  We would put out traffic counters and even on some of those we’d set up in particular places and count the number of people in vehicles across the traffic counters.  We were trying to calibrate everything to traffic counters, so that when you got data off a traffic counter you could multiply that and get your number of people and how many times they went in and out, where they came from and the whole business.

Tape two, side 1

Did you want stuff particularly on butter-making, by the way?

Yeah, I did.

Just last night I found an 1860–that was interesting because that was the first time I really found something that corresponded to this process that these Neukirk’s up in the park were using in the 1960's even.  It sounded like it was just exactly the same way they made it.  It was in this old Scientific American magazine.  It described the process of this guy making this butter.  I’ll have to find out what ‘brine’ was.  I guess it would be something like a sweet pickle type thing maybe.  You were supposed to put your butter in a jar and in a perkin? which was a tub and cover it with a sweet brine.  Leave it in there for thirteen months.

We were talking about counting the traffic to figure out how much recreation use there was.  Were there other programs that you worked on?

There have been various things surveyed over the years.  I’m not close enough to the range business to know what they do now.  But they used to read range transects periodically.  They probably still do that,  but I’m not real sure if that’s as intensive as it used to be.  They would go out and read their transects and measure to calc their little plants within the transect and measure.  That’s another thing that’s gone to the wayside.  We had range study parks, and some of those things may be still intact, but I don’t think the majority of them are.  They’ve gone by the wayside.  Typically a lot of those were areas, like along Salt Creek, badly eroded areas, and grazing was fenced out.  A range study plat was made to keep a record of some of the healing.  Most of those had camera points associated with them.  For so many years pictures were taken of the erosion to see if it was healing or not.  Those aren’t maintained like they used to be at all.  I guess it’s a function of crisis management when anything that doesn’t have some sort of a crisis associated with it is going to be the first thing that’s sacrificed.  Data collection of that kind that isn’t a direct response to a crisis is going to suffer.   And it has.  I’m sure there are other things I haven’t thought about, areas over which that’s true of stuff that was done over the years.  In fact, that’s another problem with the continuity.  The wheel has been reinvented a lot of times, in terms of things like timber surveys or this or that surveys that might have been done and management recommendations made accordingly.  Twenty years, thirty year, forty years down the road, essentially the same thing is done all over again, because there is no institutional memory that it was ever done before.  So it just keeps being done over and over.  I’m sure there are refinements, to make things better the newer they are.  But you can look back on some of these things and the recommendations probably wouldn’t be much different than they are now when they get through doing some kind of survey to decide a course of action.  You can go back fifty or sixty years ago and somebody did the same thing and said the same thing, essentially.  There is a lot of stuff lying around in the federal archives in the federal center–the same kind of stuff, just a lot of really in-depth analysis that was done years and years ago.  Pretty good stuff, good information.  Some of it is relevant even now. 

But people don’t know that it exists because they lost that institutional memory?

For the most part.  They have no clue that it exists.  There are a few people maybe in the Regional Office who know that stuff exists.  There are big books yeah thick of land classification analysis that was done back in the teens that are over there.  There’s a lot of good historical information in those, too, for camping, with the maps, they did mapping with them.  There’s a lot of stuff over there that’s just forgotten, devalued, I guess because if it didn’t happen on their watch they’re not interested.  There’s a lot of good stuff that might have happened on the last guy’s watch or five guys back there might be some things that were done.  A good illustration of that is these 1938 photos.  They were neglected for years and still are.  More and more people realize what’s going on with those and realize how valuable they are.  But there were 1938 photos on the district that were being thrown away back in the seventies.  And I rescued them and took them home and kept them for years until the climate finally changed to the point where I could bring them back and they wouldn’t get thrown away.  Now they’re back in the office and somewhat valued now.  They’d have been in the dump and that’s a pretty good illustration of what’s going to happen to some of the older stuff.  Because of this institutional weakness where you have a lack of continuity.  Those ‘38 photos are priceless now.

You’re talking about the photos that you were able to save?

Yeah, the aerial photos.  The Simmonses use them all the time now, for their surveys.  I doubt if they go as far east as you’re going on your thing, Walsenburg.  There’s a lot of stuff that shows up on those that doesn’t show up now.  Because things have grown old.  There’s some old stuff out there.  Some of it’s been saved, in fact, what they call the Pike National Forest historical collection at the library in the Springs is a good deal, because a lot of the stuff there probably had been thrown out and somebody had sense enough at least to turn it over to them years ago.  So they had a real bunch of stuff.

Was this the University Library or the City Library?

The City Library.  It was in the sixties or maybe the seventies.  Some of that stuff goes clear back to the turn of the century or awful close to it.  1905, 6, old trespass cards, and just all kinds of old stuff, old maps and a lot of material.  It’s on microfilm.  We’re trying to get a copy for the archives if we can.  I think a lot of the forest service people now don’t even know about the stuff that’s in the library.  A lot of the stuff that’s there would be relevant now, but nobody knows it’s there.  Smoky has its problems in their history, that’s for sure.

And it’s because of the moving around?

Yeah, and there was–when I think of some of the stuff we’ve done.  Torn down old cabins and cow tacks? because they’d become a nuisance.  Historic things, in fact, not all that many years ago things like that, we’d be shot before now.  Probably should have been then.  Smoky’s always been a neat freak.  He likes everything all nice and cleaned up out there.  If there’s some old cabin that’s out there littering up the place that isn’t  being used, he’d go burn the son of a gun down.  Of course things like stark? piles are historically burned, but yet we’ve burned a lot of cultural resource information with them, too.  We should have recorded them and taken pictures of them, before we did some of that kind of thing.  Smoky’s always been that way about things like saw mills.  The guy has to clean up his saw mill before he can close out his timber permit and leave nothing.  But if somebody did leave something out there, we’d go out there with a cat and bury the doggone sawmill.  I wish we had it back now.  Some of that kind of stuff got done.  I had my fingers in the middle of some of it, too.  There was no where near the sensitivity to cultural resources that there is now today.  That’s a huge improvement.  We’re kind of forced to do it because of congressional mandates.  We have to do surveys in depth, but that ends up costing a lot of money, too. 

So prior to the mandates, there was not sensitivity to cultural resources, then after the Natural Resource Protection Act, did that change the way the forest service worked?

Oh, yeah.  A lot of forest service people had big arrowhead collections.  That was just as common as it could be and nobody thought a thing of it.  If I found an arrowhead someplace, I would pick it up back in those days.  I wouldn’t think of doing that now.  I’d pick it up, I’d collect it, but I would report it and turn it into the authorities.  But I wouldn’t have back then at all.  That’s been a big change.

Has that been a gradual change?

It was kind of overnight-ish, when they started surveying.  I don’t know which act really occasioned that.  I think it was not until the ‘80s probably, when I started surveys.  It could have been late ‘70s, but it seemed like it was in the ‘80s.  It’s kind of stupid of me not to have looked up what occasioned that, but it pretty much took place all at once, or close to it.  When they had ground disturbing activity out there, you had to do the survey.  It’s not been that long ago that that started. Before that we went out and did it.  Whether it was a timber sale or a road or mining activity or anything else.   There was no cultural survey at all.  Not a whole lot of appreciation.  A few things got saved almost accidentally, in terms of old cabins and things like that.  And now we’ve actively saved things like up on Boreas Pass and the old Roberts cabin on the Tarryall.  Now the worm has turned and we’ve saved them.  Old ranger stations, the Bassom ranger station clear down in the southwest corner of the Park, which is in the San Isabel forest.  That’s not going to be torn down now, certainly. It’s part of the rental? cabin program in the forest service.  It’s been an interesting change.  I can’t think of an area where there’s been much more of a change in the forest service attitude.  All the rest of it has been an evolution. 

But that seemed like more of an overnight change?

Yeah, because Congress said so.  I shouldn’t say that either.  But even more so–and it’s kind of the same thing–in the environmental analysis business, the environmental policy act was probably far–cultural resources was kind of partial to that–but that’s been a huge change because of having to justify with environmental analysis everything that’s done now.  That’s a monumental change, that’s given rise to what they call an ‘analysis paralysis’ now.  Nothing gets done because you’re having to analyze things to death.  There’s some truth to that.  But that’s made a huge impact.  It’s brought those stinkin’ computers into play all that much more.  I think we work for them now instead of them working for us, almost.

You’re talking about computers?

Oh yeah.  They’ve taken over.  That’s my own ‘stick-in-the-mud’ attitude to an extent.  I think they’re a darn good typewriter, but beyond that, I don’t know.  You have to spend a lot of time feeding, it seems like.  I’m not sure how good the stuff is that goes in sometimes, and if it isn’t good going in it isn’t going to be very good coming out.  The computer is not my friend.  I never made my peace with those before I left.  It was good for me to be forced to use them to an extent, but all I ever used them for was in the time frame that we’re speaking of.  I would never have done it if I hadn’t been forced to.  So that has two sides to that story.  You can be a stick-in-the-mud like I am, or you can be some computer geek that’s off in the clouds and wouldn’t know how to use an axe if your life depended on it.  That’s lost, with the contracting; some of the manual skills have been lost over the years.  The ranger was out there doing this stuff at the turn of the century, and now a contractor does it.  There aren’t near as many forest service people who have manual skills as there used to be.  There are still some trails or things around here where people are doing things, there are districts that are still doing their own recreation management, as opposed to concessionaires, they still have to have people who can get out there and pound a nail.  But you lose a lot of that if you have concessionaires.  Some of those skills are down, but that just reflects society in general.  More people are on the computer than you have on the ground.  I think the fire suppression function has made a difference there in maintaining some of that kind of thing.  And I think that’s something that sets us apart a little bit from other government agencies.  Because if you, when you have that fire suppression responsibility, for the most part, your people at one time or another are going to have to get out there and measure up.  And the low-life types in other agencies can do a pretty good job of hiding, I think.  A much better job than if they’re confronted with a situation like a fire.  Sooner or later you’re going to find out whether you can do something or not when you’re faced with a fire–not in every case, either, because less and less people are involved within the forest service proportionately than there used to be.  But I think that does set us apart somewhat from other agencies.  The people that put down government agencies maybe have some arguments to an extent.  But I think that gives us a leg up because you just can’t hide.  Sooner or later you’re going to be faced with a fire situation of some kind and you’re going to have to perform.  And not everybody has to do that.  I think justifiably the agency can take a little pride in that, in some respects you have a little higher quality people.  Not a lot higher quality people than some of the people from the Hayman fire.  Some of the people taking pot shots at the forest service couldn’t carry the shoes of the people they’re taking pot shots.  But Smoky’s trying to take the high road and let some of that stuff bounce off.  It’s a shame, because people seem to feel that to build up themselves somehow they have to make a lot of criticism on what a horrible job the  forest service did on some of that kind of stuff.  I really take issue with that.  There are some darn good people in the forest service, I think a substantial cut above the average person in the private sector.  There are some excellent folks and some not so excellent, but there are still some pretty good people walking around in Smoky gear.  I guess that’s a historical perspective there.  The fire thing, there’s all this blame that’s being heaped on the forest service right now because we’ve been putting fires out all these years and that’s what’s caused all this horrible stuff.  Just in the last few days I’ve been reading about these fires a hundred and forty-two years ago, that were running for twenty miles.  And it isn’t anywhere near as much a question of forest management as it is the weather gods?.  We have had dry winters for all these years in a row.  That’s far more what does it than anything else.  Even back when there was no fire control at all Momma Nature was running those babies twenty miles.  Just like the Hayman fire did.  And that was the major factor, the weather–the cumulative effect of so much drying over the years.  That’s what causes that stuff.  There are some other contributing factors, but that has far more to do with it than this slap dance about poor management having been responsible for the fire.  It has been happening every so often for millennia and will probably still keep happening no matter what you do. Momma Nature wants it to happen it’s going to happen.  Smoky’s taken some hits he didn’t deserve. 

When you were with the forest service did they experience that same negative publicity related to fires?

No, because everybody back then was still in the ‘put-it-out’ mode, ‘put-everything-out’ mode and good old Smoky Bear type thing.  And that’s been another evolution both within and outside the forest service.  The let burn ideas have been around the forest service a long time, a lot of people have realized that you need to do some of that.  Also a lot of suppression emphasis again wasn’t just an internal thing, but it was a result of pressure from the outside because that was the holy grail--you put out fires because Smoky says so–but the business of allowing things burn in a natural fire, a prescribed fire, has finally started to assert itself in the last few years, but there still has been a lot of resistance to prescribed burn from people at the State level that turned around now and got critical after the Hayman thing.  And yet they make as difficult as possible on some of the smoke considerations with the prescribed burns.  Some of these people just got really obstructionist.  But now that something like this has happened, some of the prescribed burning has been so difficult to get a window to do it, and it’s been extremely hard to do for some of these guys that are trying to do it now.  Part of that is because of obstacles even the State government is putting out, things like smoke dispersal, making it difficult literally to do the prescribed burning.  But you’re not going to hear Nick saying that now.  They’d rather be pretty. 

So the prescribed burning burns away some of the brush so something like the Hayman won’t we as large?

The forest service has done that for a century almost.  Burning brush, burning brush piles and timber sales.  We’ve done things like that for years and years on end.  So we’ve been using fire to clean things up for a long, long time.  But as far as going out in non-timber areas and doing prescribed burning that’s taken place pretty recently.  It will happen more and more because people realize what can happen.  A lot of it’s just a function of where.  These real bad ones, that’s what causes it.  The 1879 fires up around Leadville were just huge fires.  Long before Smoky ever had any suppression ideas–long before that.  We just had these cycles of drought, and this finally got to where it was more extreme than it has been.  Before, 1978 was kind of a mini-year like this, nothing like this, but an accumulation of all these dry winters and we had fires there bigger than we’d had in years.   Just because of the weather far more than anything else.  Nothing else changed in terms of management over that time to account for that.

End of tape.