Crater Lake Historic Resource Study

XII. General Recommendations for Interpretation

It is not unusual or inappropriate that a park such as Crater Lake that contains many outstanding geological and natural resources should tend to lay its interpretive emphasis in these areas. Certain aspects of the park's early social history and administrative development might also be of interest to visitors. Suggested topics that could be elaborated upon in the park's interpretive programs and minifolders include:

1. Beliefs held by neighboring Indian groups concerning Crater Lake's mystical status, their myths explaining its formation, and their use of the area as a sacred quest site;

2. Importance of the Crater Lake region since the late 1800s as an area of study for a wide variety of scientific disciplines;

3. Problems impeding Crater Lake's designation as a national park and a discussion of the status of America's conservation movement at the time of the park's establishment;

4. Physical improvements resulting from Emergency Conservation Work and Civilian Conservation Corps camps established within the park in the 1930s; and

5. Rustic architecture--a building style characteristic of national parks in the first half of the twentieth century--as exemplified by structures in the park headquarters area.