Crater Lake National Park

Try to imagine this scene 7,700 years ago:  A volcano similar in size to Mt St Helen, explodes blowing the top 1/3 of the mountain similar to what happened in St Helen scattering rock ash and dirt all over the countryside.  There had been people in North America for nearly 4000 years by then so I sure some of the native peoples bore witness to this cataclysmic event.  The sky got dark and it rained ash for days for hundreds of miles around the volcano.  This is what happened in Crater Lake!

However the parallels of the volcano at Crater Lake and Mt St Helen end there.  Where as in Mt St Helen the expanding magma underneath carried the lava to the surface and filled the cavity that the expanding gases had emptied, no so in the Crater Lake volcano.  The magma began to solidify deep underground and new vents continued to vent the camber below the exploding peak.  With nothing to support the rest of the mountain, it collapsed into itself sinking and leaving a crater in the shape of an inverted “peak” that that is over 3000 feet deep and over 6 miles wide.  Over the last 7000 years, rain and melting snow have filled the crater and it is now the deepest lake in the United States just shy of 2000 feet deep 1943 feet at its deepest point.

We had the chance to hike down into the crater, a round trip of about three three miles and a total ascent of almost 1000 feet.  It was a great walk down, but coming up was very difficult.  Although the ascent angle was not as steep as the ones we hiked in Mt Baker and Mt Rainier, the temperature was 85 degrees and there was little shade.  To complicate things, we usually take 3 or 4 bottles of water in our hikes but this time we only had half a bottle.  It was a hard one and one half miles at almost an 8 degree ascent.  But at the end it was worth it.  Adrian got to take a dip in the lake.

View of the hiking trail down to the lake