Crater Lake -- 2

We continue the photographic summary of our time at Crater Lake National Park.

The views of the lake in yesterday's entry and in the photo below were from the Sinnott Memorial Overlook near the Steel Visitor Center.

At every step and from every view, the intensity of the blue of the lake made its presence felt--even when serving as a backdrop for this photo of the grasses along the path.

We walked along a portion of the Discovery Point Trail and caught the views of Fumarole Bay shown in the next two photos. The different shades of blue in the waters of the bay were stunning.

A portion of one of the three docks in the bay shifted its position and the three docks appeared to be presenting the identity of the bay's "resident"--"711".

From the Watchman Overlook on West Rim Drive, we had these views (next two photos) of the crater's southern wall and Wizard Island

The Skell Channel is the name for the waterway between the far right portion of Wizard Island and the crater wall.

On this beautiful, sunny day, we were also able to find the unusual. Here moss on a weathered tree trunk presented an equally attention-getting scene.

Between the two overlooks mentioned above is Discovery Point. It was here that gold prospector John Hillman became the first European-American to stumble across what he called "Deep Blue Lake."

We traveled only a small portion of the 33-mile Rim Drive and an even smaller portion of the park's 90 miles of hiking trails, but seeing the park as it is today makes it easy to understand why travelers in the early 1900's would spend three days by wagon, horseback, and on foot to reach the lake.

The park was established in 1902, but it wasn't until 1913 that the Rim Road was begun. It took six years to complete the road dubbed "The Skyline Boulevard" by newspapers of the time. (Today's Rim Drive was built between 1931 and 1940 following much the same route as Rim Road.)

Even today "Deep Blue Lake" and "Skyline Boulevard" seem to fit the lake and road quite nicely.