Wednesday, July 21, 2010

New favorite color: Crater Lake Blue

I was excited to get to Crater Lake in Southern Oregon, because my dad said it was one of his favorite places, and he had a PC desktop background to prove it. We were lucky enough to experience Sunny Day #26 at the park, thus making it the most beautiful days of all days to see the lake!

Here’s the lowdown on CL: a volcano exploded 7,700 years ago and left this incredibly deep and clear lake inside of the mouth. It’s the deepest lake in the U.S., and the water is so pure that scientists can see about 140 feet down. The clarity and depth are what make it SO INSANELY BLUE! (I’ll preface the photos by saying they were not photoshopped at all…)

Shazam! Had lunch on the side of the road with this view.

We took a ranger-led boat tour because we were feeling lazy and really had no idea what we were looking at. The tour would’ve been worth the money if the boat had gone over 10 mph, but we got good info nonetheless and got to be carted around the inside of a caldera for two hours, so no complaints.

Crazy lava formation protruding from the lake. Look at that reflection!


 Aqua water!

Weird vertically floating tree they call “Dead Man” — this basically shows you how clear the water is.

One reason to delay a trip to Crater Lake until August: MOSQUITOES. We had a 1-mile walk back up the mountain from the lake and were attacked by approximately 1,392 mosquitoes…so many that during the entire walk, we had to continually swat our backs with our hats to get ride of the 20-something that had landed on us in the last 5 seconds. Look, one even photo-bombed our picture, which we were terrified to stop and take:


 Next stop: Oregon coast!

4 comments:

  1. Gorgeous! I want to go there (except for the mosquitoes...yuck!).

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  2. That mosquitoe is sooooo big it cast its own shadow. Wow

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  3. I'm really sorry you're having such a horrible time. Come on home.

    ReplyDelete