As it happens…

As it happens, it is our plan to go see Crater Lake for the fouth time when K* comes this year.  I am looking for a job, and that may interfer- you know, "Jobs are the curse of the working class".

We have been to Crater Lake three times already.  It is a superlative place, one the Native Americans recognised as a place of power.  The first white men did not see the lake until 1853 – the Indians held that the lake was so scaredly powerful that death would came to anyone who gazed upon it, and did not speak of it.

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Some seven thousand years ago, Mt. Mazama erupted and in a cataclysmic roil of destruction, the formerly near perfect cone of the mountain was destroyed; and in it’s place, a deep crater was left, which filled with spring and rain water over the years to become the deepest lake in North America, Crater Lake.  The lake itself is 1932 feet deep.

  The crater (more properly, a caldera) is up to 4000 feet deep, and is as much as 6 miles wide.  The ash from it’s cataclysmic formation is found as far away as Nevada, Montana, Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan.  The pumice ash falls from the mountain’s destruction total over 18 cubic miles.  Pyroclastic flows of glowing ash sped at more than 100 miles an hour up to 40 miles away.  Some of the valleys to the north of Mt. Mazama were buried in more than 300 feet of ash and pumice.  The series of eruption that formed Crater Lake are estimated to have expelled as much as 25 cubic miles of material.

The waters are crystal clear- some of the clearest water anywhere fills the crater in a sight not to be missed.  Only snow and rain supply the waters of the lake; no springs or streams supply it and none drain it.  The inflow of water is nearly matched by evaporation and seepage, and the lake’s level varies by less than three feet year to year.  It’s surface area is approximately 20 miles.  Light penetrates as much a 120 feet deep into the lake- the shortest light wave lengths are blue, and so the lake is an impossibly blue color- it must be seen to be believed.

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Got any quarters (for my American readers) around?  The Oregon State quarter’s illustration on the back of the coin is of Crater Lake,  It is Oregon’s only National Park, created by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902.  Some of the state’s record snow falls occur there – up to 50 feet of snow has been known to pile up, and the rim drive around the lake is only open part of the year because of this.  The state of Oregon’s record snowfall has been measured here – 252 inches of snow at park headquarters in April 1983.

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It is our tentative plan to visit the lake again this year.  It is a long drive there and back from here in Portland.  If you drive south on I-5 about 178 miles to Roseburg, then east on OR 138 about 85 miles, you will come to OR 62, where you will turn south for just a few miles and you’ll come to Crater Lake National Park.  A visit can be made in a long day.  A better trip, which we made in a rented Cadillac Sedan de Ville, is to go to Roseburg, stay there for the night, then drive to the lake the next day and spend the whole day there, driving back to your motel/hotel in Roseburg, then making the trek back to Portland

(this are two of my friends and me in the summer of 1993 with a rented Ford Explorer)

If you park in the parking area below and make the short hike up to the rim of the caldera, I can virtually guarantee that the first word out of you mouth will be "Wow!"  It is that kind of place.

The rim drive is some 22 miles around the lake and is secnic beyound any pictures I have currently, thus, I HAVE to go back with my digi-cam and a fat memory card.

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