WOW!!
Day 18 – Nice quiet night at Diamond Lake RV Park; we all slept well. The campground is more empty this morning; several RV’s have left. We got up at 6:50 a.m. & 7:20 a.m. The kids were feeling their oats this morning, racing thru the RV on a mission to get us up. 41 degrees & sunny, clear. It’s nice to be spending another night here & not rushing to get back on the road.
We left for our day at Crater Lake at 9:35 a.m., bringing our Jersey Mike sandwiches with us in a cooler. In just a few miles we got to the border of the Crater Lake National Park & followed the Park road to the West Rim Station. The West Rim of Crater Lake, its roads & trails were closed due to the wildfires. We stopped at the scenic overlook at the gates & caught our first view of Crater Lake. Then we went the opposite direction, driving on the other side of the Lake, in total covering 2/3 of the Lake Park Road. Lots of trails & some roads were closed due to the fires. There are still 2 burning from the lightning strikes last July; one is 12% contained, the other is 24% contained. Between 800 & 900 firemen are here to work on controlling the fires. We’d like to see the rest of the Lake at another time once the fires are cleared up. From the time we started on the Lake Road until our return to the RV later this afternoon, pretty much all we said was, “WOW!!” The story of our drive around Crater Lake, a hike, and other scenic drives is told below in pictures.
Wizard Island, Crater Lake, OR
To see lots more pictures of our drive at Crater Lake,
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Crater Lake facts: Deepest lake in the USA; cleanest large body of water in the world; annual snowfall is 43 feet; lake depth is 1,943 feet; its maximum width is 6.01 miles across; holds 4.9 trillion gallons of water.
“More than 2 million gallons of water leak out of Crater Lake every hour. The Lake is fed by rain and snow, but no rivers or streams. The Lake rests inside a caldera (the belly of an erupted volcano) formed approximately 7,700 years ago when a 12,000-foot-tall volcano collapsed following a major eruption. The eruption may have been the largest in North America in the past 640,000 years. Later eruptions formed Wizard Island, a cinder cone near the southwest shore.”
“Tucked away in the Park’s southeast corner are The Pinnacles. Formed during the same eruption that gave birth to the Lake, these colorful volcanic spires, 100 feet tall, are being eroded from the canyon wall. The Pinnacles are fossil fumaroles where volcanic gases once rose up through a layer of volcanic ash, cementing the ash into volcanic rock.”
Quotes from Crater Lake brochure from the National Park Service and Park News Crater Lake, Summer/Fall 2017, respectively.
Obviously, an awesome day for us. The girls were happy to see us when we got back, and we were happy to see them. We all enjoyed our day off from travelling. Tomorrow we leave here & drive west, getting closer to the Ocean. No doubt we’ll sleep well tonight with the images from today flashing thru our heads.
Sounds like fun, traveling with the “kids”.
Ernie and Maedi.