Day 59 – May 8 – Crater Lake National Park

It had to happen.  Our luck ran out today.  It rained last night and continued during the morning.  We left the campground and drove to the National Park with no problem.  A stop at the Visitors Center and we were told the lake was socked in with fog.  There are few roads open in the park – the west entrance off highway 62 that we used and the south entrance.  After you get into the park the only roads open were to the Rim Village and a 1.1-mile drive on part of the rim.

The pictures below explain why the roads were closed.  The snow is covering most of the rim around the lake.

Snow at the side of the road 

Parking lot at Rim Village

Outside the Rim Village Gift Shop

The lake would be in view behind the tree if not for the fog

All the road signs were on very tall poles as shown in this picture

At the Rim Village we should have been able to see the lake, but the fog was too thick to see anything past 10 feet over the rim.  We waited around for a while hoping the fog would blow away, but it was not to be today.

We returned to the campers and decided to check the weather forecast for the next few days.  It appears on the web site that Sunday will be partly cloudy (or mostly sunny depending on how you look at it), so we paid for three more nights stay in the state park.

Since it was a disappointing day I decided to cover a few facts about Crater Lake for those of you who may not know the history of the park.  The basin for the lake (called a caldera) was created about 7,700 years ago when 12,000-foot Mount Mazama blew its top, so to speak.  The mountain was formed over a period of about 400,000 years (give or take a few hundred – maybe a few thousand) from repeated volcanic eruptions piled up.  The people who should know think the final eruptions may have been the largest in North America in the past 640,000 years.  According to the film we watched, they think the eruptions lasted about a week and were so massive that the supporting core of the mountain could not support the top structure of the mountain and it collapsed within itself, creating the basin for the lake.

Over hundreds of years rain and snowfall filled the basin with water.  The lake has no major inlet or outlet, so the source of the water is strictly from the surrounding runoff.  The lake area receives an average snowfall of a little over 500 inches.  We saw some of that fallen snow today, however they are well below the average for this year, having only received something like 260 inches so far this year.  The forecast is for snow tomorrow and Saturday, with an expected accumulation of around six inches.

The Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the U.S. with a depth of 1,943 feet.  It is 4 to 6 miles wide and is considered to be the cleanest and clearest large body of water in the world.  The lake water is a deep blue color – when you can see it, which we hope to do on Sunday.