We will be moving again this time to Oregon and so we decided to drive up to check the area out.  Our first stop was Crater Lake.  What a beautiful place!!

Crater Lake was formed almost 8,000 years ago when a large mountain, called Mount Mazama, erupted and collapsed into itself.  Over the years it filled with rain and melted snow.  The lake formed is one of the purest and most pristine in the world.  The water is so blue and so clear.  It’s amazing.  I’ve never seen anything like it.

The crater is 5 miles wide and it is the deepest lake in the United States.  It is 1,943 feet deep.

look at how very blue this water is

Sometime after the big explosion another volcano started to form inside the crater and formed what is now known as Wizard Island.

Sitting on the rim of the crater is a very popular, historic lodge.  It was built in 1915, I believe.  It has a stone porch with lots of rocking chairs on it where you can sit and take it all in.

Here’s the view looking the other way....pretty both directions

While driving around the rim, we found sections of snow.  Yippee!

trees, trees and more trees - I LOVE trees and mountains!!!

In the cavern areas, we found these cool looking formations.

They are fossil fumaroles.  If you can’t read the picture, they were formed during the explosion. Glowing avalaches of pumice flowed at over 100 mph down the slopes and into the valleys between the mountains.  Behind it came a heavy flow of heavier rocks.  The hot pumice below started forming plumes of hot gases, called fumaroles.  These plumes of gasses, combined with extreme heat, welded the sides of the fumaroles into the shape of slender cones., kind of like chimneys.  Over time, canyon area has eroded away and the fumaroles have stayed behind.  As more and more erosion occurs, more and more of these fumaroles are uncovered.

We found a marker on the road quite a way from Crater Lake that depicts how big the mountain originally was and how it would have looked.  It was massive but vanished after the explosion.  The line drawing above the dark mountain range in the sign below shows how big the volcano mountain was.

There is a huge flat valley area here now which was formed from the layers of stuff that the volcano spewed out.  It’s beautiful ranching land now.  We loved seeing all the cows.  Feels kind of like home in Texas with all the cows and cow smells. :)

Beautiful!

We also passed the remains of Fort Klamath which was a fort built in the mid 1800s to protect the pioneers.  There wasn’t much left of it but there was some sort of a museum.  I’m going to have to go back to check it out.