Mark’s Photos #14

Hiking the PCT, I had been in Oregon about a week when I took this picture of Crater Lake. When I left California, I hadn’t expected much of a difference in the trail, but Oregon’s scenery seemed much more driven by volcanism than its southern neighbor. Beyond Ashland, the trail traversed miles and miles of cinder fields around Mt. McLoughlin. My hat is off to the trail builders that forged a line through this nearly impossible terrain. Roughly 50 miles beyond McLoughlin was Crater Lake.

The night before I took this picture, I didn’t get much sleep. Some very loud insect, in the tree above me, made a sound a bit like a rusty chainsaw and continued all night. I stumbled out of my hammock before dawn, packed up, and fled the chainsaw. It was about an 8-mile trek up to the Crater Lake Rim. Of course, the Lake, being a National Park, had some infrastructure including places to eat, always something near and dear to a thru-hiker’s heart. So it wasn’t until after breakfast that I ventured over to the rim for a view of the lake. And what a view it was. Wizard Island sits to the middle left in the caldera of this ancient volcano, which now sports the deepest lake in North America at nearly 2,000 feet. The water therein is the collection of rainwater and snow for the last 7,700 years after the former 12,000-foot Mt. Mazama blew itself up. The rim now sits at roughly 7,000 feet. 5,000 feet of the mountain gone in an instant. Amazing, that from such a violent origin, such beauty can evolve.