Crater Lake is an incredible place. One of the High Cascades’ numerous stratovolcanoes, it was, at one time, the base of a mountain that stretched as much as 12,000 feet skyward. About 7,000 years ago (5200 BCE), a catastrophic eruption blasted the mountain skyward, and in a massive event that lasted for days and days, the entire mountain sank into the earth, leaving behind a massive caldera.
For the next 720 years, sporadic small eruptions and landslides were contained within the caldera, which filled with amazingly clear water (usually 30-40 meters of visibility) and left behind a lake that would astonish people for centuries. The eruption was witnessed by the local Klamath peoples, and remained in their legends as a battle between the sky god Skell and the god of the underworld, Llao. It has remained a place of great spiritual meaning ever since.
When Theodore Roosevelt first saw the lake, he immediately became infatuated with it, and when he became president he declared it a national park in 1902. The first white men to see the lake were perhaps a trio of prospectors in 1853, and the lake was officially surveyed in 1886 by a USGS expedition which hauled a boat up and over the crater rim to perform depth soundings of the lake.
The lake is 1,949 feet deep, and is the deepest lake in the USA, and the tenth deepest in the world.
I last visited on September 17th (birthday!) 2016.
