Crater Lake Rim Drive: clockwise from Rim Village

Next, we're heading to Discovery Point, and to the story of how outsiders first found this lake.

In the spring of 1853, eleven miners from Yreka, California, stopped for supplies at Isaac Skeeters' store in Jacksonville, Oregon. They bragged that they knew how to find a legendary lost gold mine. The storekeeper quickly gathered ten Oregonians of his own and set off after it. The trip was paid for by John Wesley Hillman, a twenty-one-year-old just back from the California goldfields.

They never found any gold. But on June twelfth, three of the party came upon a huge depression in the mountains with a large body of water sitting in it. Hillman said it was the bluest water he had ever seen. The storekeeper suggested a name: Deep Blue Lake.

Short of supplies, they went home and reported what they'd found. Nobody was interested. There was no gold in it, and people feared the unknown country beyond. Within a few years, the discovery was forgotten.

Next, we're heading to Watchman Overlook, for the best look at the island.

Wizard Island is a cinder cone. It erupted out of the lake about seven thousand three hundred years ago, a few centuries after the great collapse, while the basin was still filling with water. A map of the lake floor shows four volcanoes that have erupted inside the caldera since then. Wizard Island is the only one that ever broke the surface.

William Gladstone Steel, the man who later fought to make this a national park, gave the island its name in 1885, because of its weird appearance.

When James Sutton's party rowed out in 1869, they found it was, in Sutton's words, but a loose pile of cinders. They scrambled to the summit anyway and found a crater about ninety feet deep, with a snowbank at the bottom. They declared themselves the first people ever to set foot on the island, wrote their names on a scrap of paper, sealed it in a glass bottle and left it in the crater.

The overlook takes its name from the peak above it. In 1886, government surveyors measured the depth of the lake from a boat. A party of engineers was stationed on that summit to watch for the boat's signals and record each sounding, and so the peak above the overlook became the Watchman.

Next, we're heading to Merriam Point, by the north junction.

Long before any prospector arrived, people watched this mountain come apart. Archaeologists have found sandals buried under the ash of the eruption. The Klamath people, descendants of the Makalaks, still tell stories of it, in many versions, and the park shares one of them.

The spirit of the mountain was Llao, Chief of the Below World. Sometimes he came up from inside the earth and stood on the summit. On one visit he fell in love with the chief's beautiful daughter. When she refused to go with him, he swore to destroy her people with fire.

The spirit of the sky, Skell, Chief of the Above World, took pity on them, and stood on Mount Shasta to defend them. From their mountaintops, the two chiefs hurled red-hot rocks as large as hills. The earth trembled, and the people fled to the waters of Klamath Lake.

Two holy men offered to sacrifice themselves, and jumped into the pit of fire. Moved by their bravery, Skell drove his enemy back down into the mountain. When the sun rose, the great mountain was gone. It had fallen in on the chief of the Below World. Rain fell in torrents, and filled the hole with water.

Next, we're heading to Skell Head, along the quiet north and east side of the lake. While we go, here's how big that eruption really was.

Mount Mazama's final eruption, about seven thousand seven hundred years ago, was a hundred times the size of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. It may have been the largest in North America in the past six hundred and thirty thousand years. In just a few days, so much ash and pumice blew out of the magma chamber beneath the mountain that the chamber could no longer hold up the peak, and the summit fell in.

The eruption wiped out all life within about twenty miles, and smothered much of the Pacific Northwest under a thick layer of ash. If you gathered up that ash and spread it evenly across Oregon, it would make a layer about eight inches deep. Some of it traveled around the world. Scientists have found a layer of it in ice cores drilled in Greenland.

Everything you've seen today, the cliffs, the island, the blue water, is the aftermath of those few days.

Next, we're heading to Cloudcap Overlook, at the end of a short spur road beneath the tallest mountain in the park.

That mountain is Mount Scott, eight thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine feet high, the highest point in Crater Lake National Park. It was named for Levi Scott, a member of the convention that wrote Oregon's state constitution. In 1846, he was with a small party, including Jesse and Lindsay Applegate, on the first exploration of southern Oregon. A trail climbs to the summit: about two point two miles each way, and the park says it's best in the morning, when the light is right for looking at the lake.

The overlook itself was named by the geologist J. S. Diller, for its high dome. From the spur road, look up the side of Mount Scott for a glacial cirque, a bowl carved out by ice.

From the overlook you'll see the whole lake. Here's some of what you can't see. The lake covers about twenty-one square miles, and it's four and a half to six miles across. Most of its water, about eighty-three percent, falls straight onto the surface as rain and snow. The rest runs down the caldera walls.

The floor of the lake is not quiet. Scientists have found warm, mineral-rich pools, mats of bacteria growing around vents of warm water, and spires of silica built up by hot-water chimneys on the bottom of the caldera. The volcano is still breathing a little, deep under all that blue.

And how do scientists know the great eruption happened seven thousand seven hundred years ago? The flows of hot ash and pumice flattened the forests on the mountain's slopes, and the trees were buried where they fell. Carbon-dating the remains of those trees gives the date.

Next, we're heading to the Pumice Castle Overlook. The road under your wheels has a story of its own.

In 1913, workers with horses plowed part of the first road around the rim. Crews with hand tools graded other sections, and steam shovels moved the boulders. By 1919, people were using it: a rough, dusty road twelve feet wide, and visitors found it dangerous. Through the 1920s, cars got bigger and faster, and more people came. Passing on the tight curves was hard, and drivers pulled over wherever they could, trampling the plants.

So in 1931, the road was widened, paved and renamed the Rim Drive, with speed limits and proper parking areas. The guiding idea was designing with nature. The curves were laid out to blend into the land, so that from across the lake the road nearly disappears. The thirty or so overlooks along it were designed between 1931 and 1938, each one framing a particular view.

The next overlook is where that idea was put to the test.

Next, we're heading to Phantom Ship Overlook, to find the lake's other island.

Many visitors never notice it. It sits low, nestled against the southeast shore, and it's easy to miss. But it's far older than anything else you've seen today. The Phantom Ship is the remnant of an ancient volcanic cone that was swallowed up as Mount Mazama grew. Its rock is more than four hundred thousand years old, the oldest exposed in the basin. When the mountain collapsed, those hard spires were left standing.

The names around it come from the 1886 survey, when scientists sounded the lake for the first time. The tall cliff behind the island was named Dutton Cliff, for Captain Clarence Dutton, who led the survey party. The low gap in the rim where the overlook sits was named for Mark Kerr, the survey's chief engineer.

And the ship got its name for two reasons: it looks like a ship under sail, and it has a way of disappearing.

Next, we're heading to Sun Notch, a valley shaped by ice.

Long before it blew itself apart, the old mountain carried glaciers on its slopes. Sun Notch is one of the valleys they left behind: a U-shaped valley carved by glaciers that once flowed down the mountain. It was named for its sunny position on the rim, at the head of Sand Creek.

The road you're on has had a lot of work lately. The east side of the Rim Drive was built in the 1930s, and a recent four-year project, paid for by the Great American Outdoors Act of 2020, set out to stabilize and repair twenty miles of it. In a typical year, on two Saturdays in September, the park closes this east side of the road to cars, so bicyclists and walkers can have it to themselves. Riding the whole loop means about thirty-eight hundred feet of climbing.

One more thing about this side of the park. The south side of the park is built on what the eruption threw out. Down near Mazama Village, Annie Creek has cut a deep canyon into a layer of ash and pumice from the big eruption, a layer about two hundred feet thick. The park has a loop trail through that canyon, starting at the campground there.

The same eruption made the Pinnacles, at the end of a side road southeast of Phantom Ship Overlook. As a deposit of hot ash cooled, it formed chimneys, which the park calls fossil fumaroles: old vents where volcanic gas escaped. Erosion is still wearing them out of the canyon wall, as spires about a hundred feet tall. That road has been closed for construction work recently, so check the park's current conditions if you'd like to see them.

So much of what looks like solid ground on this side of the park is really the mountain's own ash, laid down in a few days and slowly carved ever since.

Next, we're heading to Vidae Falls, a waterfall right beside the road. Its water comes from springs, not from the lake. The parking area there was built on a large fill of earth, and in 1939 crews planted that fill with native plants. Like the overlooks, it was meant to fit the mountain rather than fight it.

Next, we're heading to Park Headquarters, and the man whose name is on the visitor center there.

In 1870, a young man in Kansas named William Gladstone Steel unwrapped his lunch, which came wrapped in a newspaper, and read an article about an unusual lake in Oregon. He promised himself he would see it. Two years later his family moved to Portland, but it was another thirteen years before he finally stood on the rim. He was so moved that he decided it should be a public park forever.

That took him seventeen years. Along the way, he helped the government survey map the lake in 1886, and he named many of the places you've seen today, including Wizard Island and Llao Rock. Sheep herders and mining interests fought his proposals. In 1893 the lake got some protection as part of a forest reserve, but for Steel that wasn't enough. He kept at it, and on May twenty-second, 1902, Crater Lake became a national park.