Crater Lake is a lake in a caldera. In the middle of the lake is an island that was formed as the eruptions from beneath built up a new outcrop from the original caldera. That island has itself formed a caldera on the summit. The scale of everything is so large that it is easy to not even notice that this second caldera sits within the first caldera. There are some trees on the island that give you some context as to how large it all is.
The water in Crater Lake was very smooth when we were there which made for great reflections of the rim of the caldera. One the other side of the crater, there was a snow bank on the side of the bowl which looked like a parallelogram. With the reflection in the water, I thought it looked a bit like an arrowhead. I am not much of a visionary when it comes to abstract images but even I saw this and thought it looked promising.
The Watchman Peak overlook at Crater Lake site beneath a peak. I don’t know the name of it but I am going to make a guess that it is Watchman Peak. Sitting on the top of it is a small stone hut. (It is possible that it isn’t small and that the distance just makes it look that way – Father Dougal, are you listening?). It was surrounded by snow so access looked pretty tricky but, if you want to go somewhere to avoid the masses for a while, I would think this place would do the trick – particularly in winter!
While Mark and I were visiting Crater Lake, we saw a guy wandering down the hill to get a better shot. The only problem was that he was on the snow bank and there was no way of knowing whether the snow was on solid rock or even was stable. It didn’t seem like a good place to go and stand, even if the photo was better for it. A short while later, I was looking up at the side of a cliff and saw this snow build up on the cliff edge. This looked like just the sort of thing that could go at any time. I wondered whether the space the guy had been on was more reliable than this!
Nancy and I made a trip to Oregon many years ago and included Crater Lake as part of our itinerary. It was a beautiful spot but the only downside was that there was a lot of fire activity in the state at that time and the view across the crater was a little obscured. We could still see across but it was all a bit washed out. I have been pondering a return ever since.
Since the road trip with Mark took us down to Klamath Falls, Crater Lake was only a short distance away. One afternoon, after we had wrapped up the aviation photos for the day, we decided to make the trip to the mountain. Not only did it make the possible plan to go there when heading to Medford the following day simpler it also meant it was a weekday and the visitor count might be a little lower.
There was no traffic on the road to the mountain which made it very relaxing. It is a steady climb to get there with a steeper climb for the final section. We got to the Rim Village area pretty easily and the conditions were fantastic. The late afternoon light was really great and, while there were plenty of people around, it wasn’t crowded. We also found that the rim road was open to the north entrance along the west rim but the east rim was still closed – presumably because the snow was still blocking things. With the sun being in the west, this meant we had access to the best side.
There are plentiful pull offs along the rim road and we stopped at pretty much all of them. Each one provided a slightly different perspective on the view and it is so beautiful, you don’t get tired of having different views all of the time. (It is true that you can get a little blasé quite quickly about just how stunning it is, though.)