Crater Lake

Note the Pumice Castle rock formation in upper right.

It’s been about 27 years since I was last here with niece Mary Kay and her brother Steve.  We did a loop, leaving from my home in Beaverton, going down the OR coast and then cutting over to Crater Lake.  We were tent camping and one of my favorite memories is the night we set up camp in the dark near Klamath Falls.  We weren’t aware that our tent was virtually under a train trestle.  A train barreled over the trestle in the wee hours of the morning and scared the crap out of us.  Mary Kay sat straight up, rudely awakened from a sound sleep, and hollered, “What’s that?!”  Makes me chuckle every time I think about it.

Crater Lake was created 7000 years ago when 12,000’ Mt Mazama collapsed from its own weight.  Numerous eruptions over 400,000 years built up the mountain and as the lava flowed out, it created a honeycomb of vertical and horizontal tubes and vents.  The collapse must have made one hell of noise; imagine millions of tons of rock falling 1.5 miles - that’s the distance between the pre-collapse summit and the deepest point in the lake.

The lake is 6 miles across at its widest point and contains 4.9 trillion gallons of water.  We’re gonna need a lot more guys and a lot more buckets to empty it out and confirm that the above figure is accurate.  The guys have to be agile to carry the buckets over the rim to empty them out.  You see, the rim ranges from 507’ to 1978’ above the lake surface and the slope is 45 degrees plus.  I’m not gonna volunteer to be one of the bucket guys but I’ll gladly supervise.  Just get me a comfortable chair, find a nice shady spot and a cold 6-pack of IPA and I’ll be all over it.  On 2^nd thought, make it a case of IPA.  And some chips.  This is gonna take awhile.

PS: For many years I was a member of a Portland-based mountaineering club that was named after this mountain.  To become a member you had to take a course that included rappelling, bare rock climbing, belaying, etc, and summit a glaciated mountain.  The Mazamas had over 2000 members, was started about a 100 years ago.  They have a big lodge near Timberline on Mt Hood, great outfit.