I’m at Crater Lake for the second of 2 days here. There isn’t actually any Internet access here, hence the abbreviated post.

I’ll update this once I’m down off the mountain on Friday night.

Update – LOTS of pictures:

Wizard Island as seen from the Crater Lake Lodge. As you can see, visibility wasn’t the greatest today – there was a bit of smoke from wildfires burning to the north, and it was also somewhat overcast and hazy.

This is the same evergreen from my visit 5 years ago. It has lost some more living pieces. I suspect that it is being harmed by people climbing on / around it (you can see where some of the roots are exposed).

Moonrise over Crater Lake. Shot hand-held with a multi-second exposure. The moon is rising through clouds to the east, where there was a thunderstorm.

This is the view of the other side of Wizard Island. You can’t see it in this photo, but the Crater Lake Lodge is on the rim, about 1/3 of the way from the right side of the picture.

This is the crater at the top of Wizard Island. Wizard is a secondary volcanic cone within the main cone that is Crater Lake. There’s even a tertiary cone on the side of the island.

There are a number of these structures on the tops of the higher mountains around the lake. They’re fire lookout / ranger stations, and you can hike up to some of them. The view must be spectacular (I didn’t try the climb), but I wouldn’t want to be up there during a lightning storm!

These are some of the rocks on the side of the caldera (crater wall). You can clearly see the volcanic origin of these rocks. Elsewhere, there are a variety of other types of rocks, including sandstone.

This is one of the many types of birds that call Crater Lake home.

There was a group of chipmunks running around one of the parking areas, begging for food and coming within a foot or so of the people that were feeding them. The newspaper and guide everyone receives upon entering the park explains why feeding (any) animals in the park is a bad idea, but some people just don’t get it. After a bit of waiting, I found one in a natural habitat.

There is still a good amount of snow left over from last winter in the park. This picture shows several patches of snow on the sides of one of the mountains. During one of the ranger talks, the ranger said that they were still giving snowshoe tours of the park in the middle of July! This past winter, the park received a total of 53 FEET of snow (the average is 44 feet). In some areas, there is still snow on the side of the road, as well as on the walls and shoreline of the crater.

Is this the mountain from the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark? No, it is one of the Scott Bluffs.

This is Phantom Ship, the other island in Crater Lake. You can see the amount of haze that was in the air.

This is Vidae Falls, one of a number of waterfalls in the park. The water comes from springs way up on the side of the mountain, and runs downhill away from the lake.

Here’s the obligatory picture of my car, since this is the Atom Across America blog, after all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2011 at 11:39 pm and is filed under The Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.