What is the name of the deepest lake in North America? Crater Lake! Tucked away in southeastern Oregon, this crater was once the giant Mazama mountain, but collapsed into itself after a massive volcanic eruption. Because Crater Lake is one of the places hit with the most snowfall every year (44 feet...or 1.5 inches/day), over 5 trillion gallons of freshwater have built up here! It is also the clearest water in the world, holding one of the Schecci Disk test records of 143 feet. It's a kind of blue that cannot be unseen. My first trip here was about 15 months ago with a ragtag group of grizzled and gnarled pioneers known as the Material Science PhD students. We had spent several hours snowshoeing our way across the South Rim of the crater, before rolling around in the snow, and running inside for warmth.
This time around the pristine snowy landscape was replaced by smoky haze. Apparently a fire had broken out on the western side of the national park. This had two unintended consequences, it was much cooler and there were no mosquitos! It was beautiful...
One thing I really wanted to do that I couldn't do last time was swim in the lake. I actually wanted to see how clear the water was, and was surprised at how deep I could see. Several hundred feet below me I could make out stones as the cliff dropped off. The deepest part of the lake is about 1900 feet.
Now things would have been pretty normal and I would have been on my way, had I not stopped at the visitor center first. I needed to check on some directions to my next destination and was about to leave, when I ran into Tanya, my labmate, from the Nanoheat group! [shoutout to the Goodson group :P ]
My favorite part of the entire Crater Lake experience was the Cleetwood Cove trail. It was one of the only trails open today (due to the fire) but still the only one in the entire park that gets you down to the shoreline and into the water. Some visitors take this trail to go on boat tours. The tours are famous for passing by a large 40-foot log named the "Old Man". This log has been bobbing around the lake since the later 1800's apparently, and as become more of tourist attraction and now a federally protected one too!