Coming into the park from any direction, you pass through vast, old-growth forests. At the lower altitudes, the trees will be mostly Ponderosa pine, transitioning to lodgepole and then to mountain hemlock and red fir as you climb to higher altitudes. These stands of imposingly large trees are impressive enough to make the drive into the interior of Oregon worth the trip. There are very few places in the lower 48 where the forests look like this—where you feel the sense of being in a dark and solemn cathedral of nature. And this is not even the main attraction.
If you come into the park through the north entrance (as I did), you will begin climbing and there will be pullouts where you can stop and take a photograph of a distant mountain that is solitary, snow-covered, and plainly volcanic: perfect for transmission by text or Instagram.
You will begin to notice, as you make your way higher and deeper into the park, that the trees are less imposing and that the stands of them are more irregular and less dense, suggesting, now, a garden in need of some fertilizer.
And then, the landscape on either side of the highway becomes a kind of vast, rust-colored barren with only the occasional stunted tree growing out in the open and those on the margins plainly struggling. Not for water, certainly, you think. There are patches of snow on the ground at this altitude, even in July, and deeper, more continuous areas of white on the slopes above.
The trees struggle because they have taken root in a pumice field—the legacy of a great volcanic explosion that occurred some 7,700 years ago, changing the landscape and leaving behind a unique and striking natural wonder and legacy. That would be Crater Lake.
You reach the pullout leading to the rim of the lake a couple of miles after you first come on the barrens. You can’t see anything of interest from where you park. But there are people lined up along a barrier and many of them are, inevitably, holding smartphones and cameras away from their bodies and taking pictures.
Even if you know what they are admiring and photographing, you are unprepared for your own first look. Impossible that you could be. No words or images could prepare you. It is like your first look at the Grand Canyon, that way. “Stunning” is probably the best word and seems woefully insufficient.
There is, to begin with, the sheer size of the lake: 20.6 square miles of water up here in the high country, where the only other water you have seen is a trickle of snow melt, running across the asphalt. The proportions alone are breathtaking. The lake is nearly 2,000 feet deep, making it the seventh deepest in the world. And while you can’t see this, you can sense that it is very, very deep.
And then there is the color. It is a blue that is beyond blue. A shade of blue that admits nothing else from the spectrum. The purest blue, easily, that I have ever seen.
The first settlers to see it were prospectors in search of gold, and one of them noted that it was the bluest lake he had ever seen. One of his companions named it, unimaginatively, “Deep Blue Lake.” A member of a later group of prospectors published an article in which he named it, simply, “Blue Lake.”
The lake was, of course, known to the native Americans of the region long before those prospectors stumbled upon it. Some had, in fact, witnessed its magnificent and terrifying birth. The creation of the lake was, according to their legend, the climax of a war between rival spirits and their mountains. The struggle culminated in the terrible explosion of Mount Mazama that forced one of the rivals deep into the earth under the resulting crater, which then filled with beautiful blue water to conceal the terrible scar and reestablish tranquility.
The empirical, geological account has the top of Mt. Mazama blowing up under huge pressure and then collapsing into a void left by a now-empty magma chamber. The lake then filled, slowly, with accumulated snow melt. There is no other water source feeding the lake. It is kept full by a cycle of precipitation, runoff, and evaporation. Hence the stunning clarity of the lake.
Exploration of the lake—and ambiguity about its name—continued until 1869, when a party that included a newspaper editor got a canvas boat down the side of the caldera and conducted some primitive exploration. The newspaperman, Jim Sutton, wrote an article in which he used the name “Crater Lake.”
It stuck. And then there was another newspaper article that led to the designation and preservation of Crater Lake National Park.
William Gladstone Steel first became aware of Crater Lake when, in 1870, as a boy in Ohio, he read about it in a newspaper used to wrap the sandwich he carried to school for lunch. This was the beginning of a lifelong passion to which he devoted both money and time. All that he could spare.
Steel finally saw the lake of his dreams and imagination in 1885. Seventeen years later, his efforts on its behalf came to fruition, when President Theodore Roosevelt signed legislation establishing Crater Lake as the nation’s sixth national park. The only one in Oregon, then and now.
The lake remains seductively dazzling for all who have come after Steel. From that first pullout, it is possible to drive its entire circumference, which is well worth doing if you have the time. Each pullout seems to open another vista but always the background, the overarching theme, is that consistently dazzling blue surface.
You can make your way down to the water, and many do. Once there, you can swim, but you won’t be doing it for very long. The water is as intensely cold as it is blue. You can also fish. There were no fish in the lake until a stocking program introduced several species of which only two remain: rainbow trout and kokanee salmon. You do not need a license, but you may not use natural bait of any kind. Nor can you clean your fish on the shore and discard the offal in the water. (It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to; hard to imagine anyone wanting to do anything that might compromise the nearly palpable purity of the lake.)
Once you have gone around the circumference of the lake and have gone down into the caldera either to fish or to swim, there is still some more to do. There is a lodge and restaurant on a high point overlooking the lake. From there, you can take the exceedingly winding road down, stopping along the way at a visitors’ center where you will meet some rangers who are, in my experience, among the friendliest and most knowledgeable in the entire park system. Which is saying something.
I talked to one of them about the geology of the area. He explained how trees were slowly taking root and establishing themselves on the margins of the great pumice barrens I had driven by on my way into the park. “It takes time,” he said. “That rock is 300 feet deep in some places. And very porous. So it doesn’t hold water and there isn’t much organic material. So things have to die and decay so that soil builds up and the trees can get established and rooted. But in another seven thousand years or so, it will all be different and you wouldn’t recognize this place.”
I said I would take his word for it.
We talked about the great, old-growth conifers, and he helped me with the identifications. When I asked about a good place for a day hike where I might get a look at some wildlife and blooming alpine flowers, he unfolded one of the giveaway maps and marked a spot called Annie Creek with his pen.
“I can’t promise anything when it comes to animals. But you’ll see flowers. It is a very nice walk.”
Indeed, it is. It took me a little less than two hours, but then I was dawdling. Trying to stretch out my time in this place. I stood in one spot for maybe 20 minutes while I watched a young mule deer graze, upwind from me and oblivious to my presence.
There are other trails in the park—90 miles’ worth—and more in the several national forests that surround it. You can camp overnight in the backcountry with the proper permits. But the place to be if you are inside the park at night is on the rim of the lake where there is no light pollution and where the still surface reflects some of the countless stars that show clean and precise in the heavens.
It all seems transcendently peaceful and quiet for a place where just a few thousand years ago, rival spirits waged war and tore apart the very fabric of the world.
