Wednesday, May 8, 2019
Today we drove up to Crater Lake National Park. Most of the park is still closed due to snow, walls of snow. But you can still get a good view of it if you walk out on the snow.
This used to be Mount Mazama. It collapsed into a caldera due to volcanic activity and then filled with water to form Crater Lake.
I mean a LOT of snow. It’s piled as high as the roofs of the building.
Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the US and also has the purest water. There is no water running in to the lake except rain and melting snow inside the rim and no water running out of it except for seepage and evaporation. So no impurities come into the water. This is why the water is so blue.
Come walk in the snow with me.
There is an island in the Lake named Wizard Island. It is a cinder cone. Cinder cones are the simplest type of volcano. They are built from particles and blobs of congealed lava ejected from a single vent. As the gas-charged lava is blown violently into the air, it breaks into small fragments that solidify and fall as cinders around the vent to form a circular or oval cone.
They have warning signs and rope to keep people back from the edge so they don’t slide off and over.
Jeremiah using Suzie’s walking stick for Jedi moves.
Josiah decided to be a stinker and built a teeny snowman and placed it right in the middle of the road! We saw people slowly drive around it (0:
Thought this was neat. We made a hole in the snow with the walking stick. The snow inside has a bluish tint to it.
We were wondering why the roads were lined with skinny trees. They were mounted in holders along the side of the road. Many of them are broken.
They use these trees along both sides of the road as markers so that the snow plows can determine where the road is when they go to plow. The trees are at least 12 feet tall…that tells you how high the snow can get. The average snowfall here is 42 ft. per year.
Since we couldn’t visit much of the park due to it being closed, we only stayed a couple of hours. We had left the motor home in a Walmart parking lot and just drove the van up the mountain to see Crater Lake. So we drove back down, hooked the van back to the motor home and headed to see a childhood friend of Donald’s from back in Seville.
Jess and his wife Camille had us come to their house and park in the road for the night. They had ordered some yummy pizza for us. We had a nice evening eating and visiting with them. Thanks Jess and Camille!!
