Bluer than blue, deeper than deep.  We never imagined Crater Lake would be so beautiful!  Our first glimpse took our breath away.  Aqua, azure, cobalt, indigo, midnight, royal and sapphire, none of those words can fully describe the beauty of the color which can change depending on the time of day.    

We left lovely La Pine State Park and traveled the short distance to Crater Lake National Park, which is the only national park in Oregon.  They were doing quite a bit of road work in the park, taking advantage of the short summer season.  After waiting a short time in stopped traffic, we arrived at Mazama Village Campground on the south side of Crater Lake National Park.  We had planned on four days of dry camping here but after two days we were able to move to a full hookup site.  It was nice to have electricity and heat with nighttime temperatures reaching the upper thirties and low forties. 

The best way to view Crater Lake is by driving the 33 mile Rim Drive which makes a loop around the lake.  It took us two days to drive the loop because of the thirty-three overlooks and things to stop and see.  Crater Lake, at 1,943 feet, is the deepest lake in the United States and is fed by rain and snow, not streams or rivers.  One of the Rangers told us if you took the Eiffel Tower and put the Washington Monument on top of it and then put the Statue of Liberty on top of those two, the torch would still be under water.  If you gave each person on earth 7,000 gallons of water, the lake would not be empty.  The lake is considered the cleanest large body of water in the world and is known for its clarity and intense blue color.

Crater Lake rests inside a caldera formed approximately 7,700 years ago when 12,000 foot tall Mount Mazama collapsed following a major eruption.  The eruption may have been the largest in North America in the past 640,000 years.  Later eruptions formed Wizard Island which is a cinder cone in the southwest area of the lake.  If you gathered up all the ash from the Mount Mazama eruption and spread it evenly over the state of Oregon, it would form a layer eight inches thick.  

Zoomed in view of crater on top of Wizard Island

Crater Lake National Park is home to more than forty volcanoes and everywhere we looked we saw cinder cones, peaks and hills from volcanoes that erupted in the past 500,000 years.  Not all of them can be seen since some of them are underwater in the lake!  Many of the volcanoes are extinct such as Wizard Island, but the volcano which holds Crater Lake is likely to erupt again!  

Cinder cones in the distance

Watchman Peak, 8,013 ft

snow still visible on the lake shore in August

We stopped at the Visitor Center and talked with a super friendly and enthusiastic park ranger.  We saw a fabulous film detailing how they believe Crater Lake was formed after the Mount Mazama eruption.

They have a trolley which will take you around the lake but we chose to drive our car and go at our own speed, taking as much time at each overlook as we wanted.  Some of the highlights of our drive on Rim Drive was Pumice Castle Overlook where a layer of orange pumice rock has been eroded into the shape of a castle.  Also Pinnacles Overlook was fabulous with colorful spires 100 feet tall eroded from the canyon wall.  The Pinnacles are “fossil fumaroles” where volcanic gases rose up through a layer of volcanic ash, cementing the ash into solid rock.  Phantom Ship Overlook had a view of a small island that they say looks like a small sailboat, though it takes quite an imagination to see the shape of a boat.  Vidae Falls, with a drop of 100 feet was beautiful.  But the biggest highlight of the drive was just seeing Crater Lake itself.  At each overlook people gazed at the lake in awe, speaking in whispers or simply drinking in the beauty in silence.  

We really wanted to take the narrated boat tour of the lake with a three hour stop to explore Wizard Island.  We were ready to book the tour when we noticed in the description of the trip that you would have to hike down the side of the rim of the volcano to get to the water.  The only way to get to the shore of Crater Lake is to hike down Cleetwood Cove Trail, a mile long, very steep and strenous trail that drops 700 feet in elevation.  It was the description of hiking back up that got us.  It was equivalent to climbing 70 FLIGHTS of steps.  As one person said, it is one mile down and feels like ten miles back straight uphill.  If you were injured or became ill, the only way back up was to be carried up by a team of Rangers.  So we reluctantly and wisely gave up that idea!  One of the Rangers told us they have flirted with the idea over the years of putting in a ski lift or some kind of lift that would make it more accessible to people.  The park has managed to escape the boat access not being handicapped accessible because they did not want to damage the beauty and risk the fragile nature of the lake landscape.  As the Ranger said, it is a hard choice when you consider keeping the park as an honored place.

White spot is boat and to the right is the steep trail from rim top to shore

zoomed in view of boat and can see clarity of water

We loved our time in Crater Lake and the campground was wonderful.  We were able to get satellite TV with the only negative being no internet and limited cell phone service.

Other Crater Lake trivia:

• Annual snowfall is 44 feet.
• Widest area across the lake is six miles.
• The lowest point from the rim to the lake is 570 feet.
• The last time the lake froze over was 1949 but even then the Ranger’s footprints left a sloshy path as he walked across.
• Crater Lake National Park was established in 1902 when President Theodore Roosevelt designated it America’s fifth national park.
• The Park is of importance to local Klamath Native American tribes, with Native Americans witnessing the eruption 7,700 years ago and passing down through time an oral history of the event.  The Klamath call the Lake “gii-waas”, sacred place.
• The lake was discovered in the 1850’s by a European, John Wesley Hillman.  The Ranger said Hillman fell asleep on his mule and the mule stopped on the edge of the crater.  Imagine Hillman waking up to that view!

In 1988 and 1989, a one person submarine made 47 dives to the bottom of Crater Lake to collect data on the lake’s hydrology, biology and geology.  Another important reason for the submarine dives was to explore the geothermal energy of the lake.  Beneath Crater Lake National Park lies a reservoir of restless magma.  In the mid 1980’s a company from California announced its desire to build a power plant on public lands adjacent to the park.  They planned to use geothermal heat to spin turbines to produce electricity for San Francisco.  They drilled an exploratory well a half mile from the park boundary.  This caused deep concern and with the findings of the submarine dives, Crater Lake joined a list of 15 other National Park Services deemed to have “significant thermal features” worthy of protection under the Geothermal Steam Act, a law passed by Congress in 1970.  The submarine only explored 2% of the lake floor, so there is much more to learn about Crater Lake.

For the past three years southern Oregon has been experiencing near drought conditions, with Crater Lake’s snowfall last year at only 50% of the average.  As of this time the lake’s depth has not been impacted.