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Oregon: Crater Lake National Park

Rolling mountains, volcanic peaks, and evergreen forests surround this enormous, high Cascade Range lake, recognized worldwide as a scenic wonder. Crater Lake was established as a national park in 1902 after 17 years of lobbying by William Gladstone Steel. He had learned of Crater Lake as a Kansas schoolboy reading a newspaper used to wrap his lunch. It was named after the small crater at the top of Wizard Island, (the cinder cone in the lake that rises some 760 feet above water). On sunny summer days, neither words nor photographs can capture Crater Lake's remarkable blueness. This intense hue/color is due to the fact that light gets absorbed color by color as it passes through clear water. First the reds, then orange, yellow, and green. Last to be absorbed are the blues. Only the deepest blue gets scattered back to where you see it as the color of the water. The water is of course no more blue, than the sky is blue. But it looks incredible! When the lake is perfectly still, one can see it act as a grand mirror for the sky, and surrounding rim.

Much of the year, usually October to July at higher elevations, a thick blanket of snow encircles the lake. Snowfall provides most of the park's annual 66 inches of precipitation. Crater Lake rarely freezes over completely; it last did in 1949. Heat from the summer sun stored in the immense body of water retards ice formation throughout the winter. On the earth clock, natural forces only recently constructed this landscape. Lava f lows first formed a high plateau base on which explosive eruptions then built the Cascade volcanoes. Humans probably witnessed the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Mazama about 7,700 years ago.

Shamans in historic time forbade most Indians to view the lake, and Indians said nothing about it to trappers and pioneers, who for 50 years did not find it. Then, in 1853, while searching for the Lost Cabin Gold Mine, some prospectors, including John Wesley Hillman, happened onto Crater Lake.

Soundings with piano wire by a U.S. Geological Survey party in 1886 set the lake's depth at 1,996 feet, close to sonar findings of 1,932 feet officially recorded in 1959. The clean, clear, cold lakewater contained no fish until they were introduced by humans from 1888 to 1941. Today, rainbow trout and kokanee salmon still survive in Crater Lake.

Wildflowers bloom late and disappear early here, thriving in wet, open areas. Birds and other animals often seen are ravens, jays, nutcrackers, deer, ground squirrels, and chipmunks. Present but seldom seen are elk, black bears, foxes, porcupines, pine martens, chickaree squirrels, and pikas.

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Oregon Hiking, Mountain Biking

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