Crater Lake National Park would be my only stop in Oregon and the only place on my entire itinerary I had been to before, once, in the summer of 2006. That time the park had been engulfed in smoke from a forest fire. This time the weather was gorgeous so for the first time I could actually see the famously blue lake.
Crater Lake sits in a big hole (a caldera, not a crater) left by the eruption some 7700 years ago of a Cascade stratovolcano posthumously named Mount Mazama. It is the deepest lake in the US (1,943 feet), seventh deepest in the world, and also one of the clearest. Thus I was surprised to see large swaths of some kind of scum floating on the surface. I later asked the ranger if this was algae and she said "no, but that's what everybody thinks" (funny how we are so quick to assume things are always going to hell). In fact it was pollen from the pines, perfectly normal, perfectly ecological. The currents were gathering it into patterns and so I was able to get into it like it was artwork by Christo and Jean Claude.
Crater Lake became our 5th (or 6th - it's a long story) National Park in 1903. It is a relatively small park - 183,224 acres - and the lake itself takes up 13,440 acres. The caldera walls are off limits to everyone, including the few who might safely negotiate their steep crumbly walls. Only one trail leads from the rim down to the lake, and no private boats are allowed. A concessionaire’s tour boat whisks people around for a couple of hours, and you can get off the boat and traipse around Wizard Island. Tickets for the boat cost $26, fine if you're on vacation but not so great if you've just quit your job. For me that means not this time.
Otherwise the primary activity is driving around the 33-mile rim road. This is closed by snow most of the year and it was still closed the day I arrived, but the rangers said it could open the following day. So I puttered around the exhibits, tried to relearn some geology, and then found some shade and read the park newsletter. It reported on the forest fire I witnessed - called the Bybee Fire - on my visit two years earlier. Lightning started the fire on July 23, 2006 and 3000 acres burned before a snowstorm put it out in the middle of September. The national park managed the fire rather than extinguish it. Fire crews protected developed areas and worked to keep it within the national park, otherwise let it burn freely. The park considers its fire management a success, and refers to it as a socio-educational event, meaning they had to make some educational lemonade to pacify all the cranky visitors who couldn’t see the lake they had come to see. (Yosemite was doing the same thing late last month.)
Some other things I read:
- Park HQ gets 44 feet of snow each year.
- The average high for July and August is 69 degrees. The average low for those months is 41 degrees. The surface of the lake gets up to 59 degrees in August and drops to 37 degrees by February.
- Since 1983, summer nighttime air temperatures at Crater Lake have risen an average of 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. This is consistent with patterns across the western US. Not yet evident if lake itself is getting warmer.
- Surveys indicate 17 pairs of northern spotted owl reside in the NP.
But I knew I shouldn't have been reading all of this. I should have been reading the owners manual for my new car. I was already getting a light requesting maintenance. But no, I found the manual too dispiriting, and mosquitoes drove me to a breezy overlook where I resumed my nature studies.
- Mountain pine beetles have recently moved from lodgepole pine, their traditional host, to white bark pine, Crater Lake's keystone species. This is probably because warming temperatures have allowed them to survive at higher elevations previously beyond their range, elevations where only white bark pine prevail. White pine blister rust, a non-native fungus, is also attacking the white bark. The park is battling the fungus but has traditionally given the pine beetles their due as natives. The last outbreak at Crater Lake National Park was between 1923-30. But the park is taking further steps to protect the White bark, at least around Rim Village, employing a non-toxic chemical mimic hormone repellent.
The road around the crater rim did indeed open the next day - just for me - so I drove over to east side of the park and had my lunch at the White Pine Picnic Area. This sits near the base of Mount Scott, which rises to 8929’, the highest point in Crater Lake National Park and one of the two surviving remnants from Mount Mazama. Though drier on this side of the park, some snow patches remained. Huge numbers of ants were going wild on the newly melted-out ground.
Sometime after lunch I had to go over and help a fellow traveler push his SUV out of a snowdrift. My original notes used the term "some moron" instead of “fellow traveler“ - after all, the parking lot was completely free of snow except for the one snow bank he decided to drive into, presumably to show off how his SUV could handle snowdrifts - but subsequent events led me to soften my judgment. I was reading and studiously ignoring him and his party as they first tried gunning the vehicle back and forth and then tried the cardboard-under-the-wheels routine. Finally they settled on trying to push it out and seeing I would be critical to that effort I went over and with a heave and a ho we pushed it back on to dry land.
Later that day when I went to change the bandage on my picnic table wound I saw dried blood from a bigger gash which I had obviously incurred but hadn’t felt while pushing the SUV. Back to the first aid kit for the triple-antibacterial and an even bigger bandage, also on my right hand. At this rate I would quickly become ambidextrous.
The next day I set out on my first hike of 2008 - on July 12th! Normally I let myself go to hell from November to March or so but start getting out more through the spring and by June I am hiking rather regularly. This year, due to preparations for my trip, I’ve done no hiking. No Tiger Mountain, no Lake 22, no nothing.
My destination was Mount Scott, which despite its elevation is a relatively short hike with a moderate grade (5RT/1250'), a good way to start. 8929’ is a mere bump compared to what I would be looking at in the Sierra Nevada but is quite high for the Cascades. One can enjoy a splendid hiking seasons in the North Cascades and never get close to 8000'. I debuted my sun hat and found I liked it. Along with my first-aid kit, it was a good start for my REI stuff. Lots of snow patches early on but up high was dry and smooth. Lookout on peak is defunct. Smoky pall over northern California, though Mt McGlaughlin was rather clear. Other than that I saw nearby Thielsen, with Bachelor and some Sisters off in the distance.
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| Mt. McLoughlin from Mount Scott |
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