Sept. 22, 2010

Yesterday morning I was reminded once again of Lewis and Clark.  We'd gotten about 20 miles out of Portland and I thought about calling Andrew.  I felt in my purse for my phone ... and it wasn't there!  After a phone call to the hotel, we headed back to Portland to get it.  I was really mad at myself!!!  But then I remembered a story from Undaunted Courage in which Lewis sent a man back to find his gun after he'd dropped it when he'd come upon a bear.  I can't claim to have had any issue with a bear, but the location of the electrical outlet wasn't obvious, and it matched the black color of the coffee pot.  The good news is that we'd only gone 20 miles, and that I remembered it!!

The rest of day went much better.  We arrived at Crater Lake National Park around 3:00 p.m.  The most surprising thing about this park is that it is surrounded by pumice desert.  Not much grows in the land that surrounds the crater itself.  That's not to say there's no vegetation, but it's different from what I expected.  When the mountain erupted eons ago (not really that long ago ... I guess it was 7500 years ago), it blew a mile-high top off of the mountain and buried the surrounding landscape in pumice and scoria up to 100 feet deep. Since then, I suppose because of erosion, some areas have pine and spruce trees, but much of it remains barren.  The lake is very, very blue and very pure ... no water feeds it and no water leaves the lake except for evaporation; it's fed completely by snow and rain.  It's the deepest lake in the U.S., and the water depth varies by only about 3 ft.  It's quite something to see and impossible to appreciate in a photograph.

Pumice Desert

View from the rim into the caldera

The blue is the lake, not the sky!

Again, this is looking down into the lake.  Look carefully in the upper right of the photo.  There's a sliver of blue created by a small rock resting on a larger one.

Late shadows on the lake

This morning we read in a paper, while getting an oil change, that on Sept. 11 a 2003 VW Passat had rolled into the lake.  The owners hadn't set the emergency brake!  Their dog was inside the car, had jumped out of the sunroof at about 600 feet, and SURVIVED with only a few scrapes.  The car was a mess.  It landed in about 10 feet of water, and just yesterday they had a helicopter rescue of the trash from the ridge as it bumped its way down the steep 1100 foot caldera wall and of the remnants of the car.  I wish we'd been there early enough to see that, but wow, am I glad it wasn't our car!  The last car to end up in the lake was in 1922, so it doesn't happen often, but it does happen!  Yikes!!