Crater Lake

The bandwagon rolls on. This was supposed to be a leisurely day of driving. Or so I thought :). Going by the Memento style of blogging that I promised, let me introduce my companions for this part of the trip, one by one. I have an awesome photo of Jeff Fingler from today. Here is him munching on a leg of lamb at an Ethiopian restaurant called Jarra's in Portland Oregon.


Jeff is a physicist like myself who works on the human visual system at Caltech. He is on his way towards developing an effective and quick method of taking a map of the blood vessels around the retina. He claims that these techniques will help diagnose eye diseases quicker. He does all this cool work when he is not in his caveman mode.

So moving back to the highlight of the day, I notched up another national park on my significant belt. The national park in question was Crater Lake national park, which is a caldera that was formed about 7700 years ago by the collapse of a big volcano, much like Mt Rainier or Mt Hood (which we should meet tomorrow, rain Gods permitting). The crater left behind by the collapse is about 6 miles (10 km) in diameter and is very close to being a perfect circle.


None of these photos are photoshopped. The lake is really this beautiful. It is because of its unique geography. The lake has no inlets or outlets and is thus only connected to the outside world via the atmosphere. Evaporation is the only way the water can leave the lake. But given that the lake is the deepest freshwater lake in the world, the surface area to volume ratio is very low and thus evaporation is very slow. The only input is through ice and snow that directly falls into the lake. It took about 150 years to fill up the lake after the initial implosion. All this makes Crater lake's water one of the purest on the planet. A friendly park ranger was telling us about the distance to which an 8-inch black and white patterned disk can be seen in direct sunlight in this water. It is upto 144 feet (more than 3 times the nominal 30 feet for clear water).

The island that you see in the previous photo is called the Eagle island and it is a volcano in its own right (more like a cinder cone). The water around it formed some of the most spectacular patterns or aqua, blue and topaz colors.


All this is well and good, but you probably don't get a sense of scale from all these photos. If you noticed some photos ago, there was a little boat in the photo. This boat gives you perspective on the immensity of this wonderful place. Besides the water was so calm that the waves left behind by the boat spread out in a beautiful pattern that is usually destroyed by ambient noise sources like wind and currents (non-existent here).



We had lunch looking at this ancient beauty and then drove about 5 hours to get to Portland, where we were greeted by rain. It was nice to be in cool weather with rain pelting down. Tomorrow we will roam around Portland and drive to Seattle in the evening.