Things will look different this year at two of Oregon's most famous destinations as rangers put natural history front and center during tours of Oregon Caves National Monument, and a $1.75 million restoration of Rim Village gets under way at Crater Lake National Park. 

National Park Service rangers for the first time will guide visitors through the "Marble Halls of Oregon" when the newly expanded 90-minute tours resume March 16. 

"The monument is not here as an entertaining moneymaker. The monument was set aside because it's part of our natural heritage, and we think that's the way it should be interpreted," said Oregon Caves Superintendent Craig Ackerman. "We would rather have fewer people with a better experience than have a ton people going through the cave (who) randomly remember that that formation looks like ET spanking a baby." 

Ranger-led tours are the latest change in a decadelong shift in emphasis at Oregon Caves, which already has seen the first serious scientific analysis of the caves, including the discovery of prehistoric bones from grizzly bears and jaguars, and a $1.3 million restoration of the cave's interior. 

By summer, the Park Service plans to offer four-hour, off-trail tours for cavers and candlelight tours for history buffs. 

"The off-trail tour is not going to be a walking tour. It's going to be crawling and slithering. There are going to be passageways that are difficult to get through," Ackerman said. "The candlelight tours are living history to let people see how the first folks who went through saw the caves. It looks very different when you have a single candle." 

The switch to ranger-led tours has been controversial in Josephine County, where a private concessionaire for many years has offered theme-park style tours, emphasizing the similarity of the caves' natural formations with mass-culture icons, such as ET or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Under that system, the Park Service collected 1.9 percent of cave admission fees to maintain and upgrade visitors facilities at Oregon Caves. 

With ranger-led tours, the Park Service will receive 80 percent of the estimated $300,000 in admission fees for use on the Oregon Caves National Monument and contribute the remaining 20 percent to a national fund earmarked for improvements at any of the nation's 384 areas maintained by the National Park Service. 

Another change which may come this year is an expansion of Oregon Caves' boundaries from the current 484 acres to a proposed 3,884 acres. The expansion, which has been approved regionally and may be included in this year's omnibus legislation funding the Park Service, would remove land from the Siskiyou National Forest, including 3,310 acres designated late-successional reserve and 90 acres of already-harvested matrix land. 

"It's impossible to manage an intact ecosystem of any type in 480 acres," Ackerman said. 

The expansion proposal may have received a boost with the recent discovery of a second cave a mile from the current monument on Siskiyou National Forest land proposed for inclusion in Oregon Caves. Many local cavers think it is connected to the one first discovered by pioneer Elijah Davidson in 1874. 

"That would be an area of focus for us if it were included in the monument, for both scientific study and the potential for visitor use," Ackerman said. 


Timed to precede anniversary 
Meanwhile, at Crater Lake National Park, restoration gets underway at four historic buildings at Rim Village, including the Sinnott Memorial Overlook and Museum, the Kiser Studio, the Community House and the Plaza Comfort Station. 

"The contractor should be on site probably sometime in May," said Crater Lake National Park Ranger Kent Taylor. "They'll be here through the summer and they hope to finish sometime in midfall." 

The restoration work comes one year before the 100th anniversary of Oregon's only national park in 2002, when rangers hope to again offer special programs each evening at the Community House and debut new permanent exhibits on the fresh water properties of Crater Lake and geologic formation of the caldera at Sinnott Memorial. 

"On the outside it'll look pretty much as it has since the 1930s when it opened. When the exhibits are put in, it will be the first time we've had exhibits in there in years," Taylor said. "That'll be a big asset for visitors to take advantage of."