Water Resources People and Issues
dust. It was cold and miserable, and my survey crew-1 was the chief of
party-kidded me unmercifully about my interest in climbing mountains. I
guess I talked to them about climbing mountains, because right over there to
the west of us were the Three Sisters in the Oregon Cascade range. I just
looked at those peaks and talked about them, and I wanted to get over there and
climb, but it was early spring and you couldn't do it without a well equipped
party. Also I didn't feel comfortable about snow and ice.
My
knew that I wanted to climb those mountains, and so they would
go out of their way to locate survey points-we were doing plane table and
alidade surveys-on some isolated pinnacle where there was hardly room to get
around the plane table to take sights. In one place there wasn't even room to
take any sights. And they would laugh at my discomfort as I struggled to set
up on the little pinnacle. This was in the gorge where we eventually built the
Prineville Dam for the Crooked River project.
They were kind of needling me-1 was replacing their much loved former party
chief, who had been drafted, and so they probably were testing me to see how
much I could take. But I had a lot of fun and I used to write to the woman who
eventually became my wife, and she said that the most interesting letters I ever
wrote were when I was writing from the Crooked River country because Dick
Bryant was such a fascinating character. He was an old rancher and he would
serve up dinner and the meat tasted a little bit different, but I didn't really
know what it was. And he would say, "This is good beef, isn't it?" and then
I finally realized that it was venison. He was not averse, when he needed food,
to shooting a deer and having venison for a while.
They were really isolated up there. They had one of these old telephone lines.
It was a single wire system, with the return through the ground. When the wire
got blown down one time they hooked the remaining section on to somebody's
fence wire, and so from then on they called it the
line.
Even though it was isolated, word got around so that they knew when the game
warden was coming up. Then they made sure that there wasn't any venison
around, or anything like that. It was about 70 miles up the river from Prineville
to
through a little town called Post, dirt road all the way. You could
take a short cut over the hill if it wasn't so muddy and rainy that you would
have trouble getting over the hill. That would save you about 10 miles.
50
Previous Page
