Crater Lake (called Giiwas by the local Klamath tribe) is in Oregon, USA. It was formed nearly 8,000 years ago when the volcano Mazama, the home of Llao of the Below World, collapsed during a battle against Skell of the Above World. At 1,949 ft (594 m), the lake is the deepst in the US and the 2nd-deepest in North America (behind Great Slave Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories) and is famous for its clarity and deep blue color; it was callled Deep Blue Lake by its discoverer, prrospector John Wesley Hillman, in 1853. It was subsequently renamed Blue Lake and Lake Majesty. William Gladstone Steel traveled to Ft. Klamath in 1885 and then walked the remaining 20 miles to the lake and began publicizing the site, naming many of its landmarks such as Wizard Island, Llao Rock, and Skell Head. With help from geologist Clarence Dutton, he organized an expedition to study the lake in 1886 and the area's topography. A decde later he hosted hundreds of people, including politicians and scentists, at a three-week convention and mountain climbing tour, which closed with the christening of the former volcano.Through Steel's relentless lobbying, president Theodore Roosevelt established Crater Lake National Park in 1902, the nation's sixth, and he later served as its superintendent for three years. Joaquin Miller, the renowned "Poet of the Sierras" -- a former Pony Express rider, mining-camp cook, horse thief, lawyer, and judge -- gave an early description: "The lake? The Sea of Silence?... I should like to let it alone, say nothing. It took such hold of my heart ... that I love it almost like one of my own family. But fancy a sea of sapphire set around by a compact circle of the great grizzly rock of Yosemite. It does not seem so sublime at first, but the mote is in your own eye. It is great, great, but it takes you days to see how great. It lies two thousand feet under your feet, and as it reflects its walls so perfectly that you cannot tell the wall from the reflection in the intensely blue water, you have a continuous and unbroken circular wall of twenty-four miles to contemplate at a glance, all of which lies two thousand feet, and seems to lie four thousand feet, below! Yet so bright, yet so intensely blue is the lake that it seems at times, from some points of view, to lift right in your face. In fact, the place has long been called by mountaineers, along with many other names, Spook Lake. The one thing that first strikes you after the color, the blue, blue, even to blackness, with its belt of green clinging to the bastions of the wall, is the silence, the Sunday morning silence, that broods at all times over all things. The huge and towering hemlocks sing their low monotone away up against the sky, but that is all you hear, not a bird, not a beast, wild or tame. It is not an intense silence, as if you were lost, but a sweet, sympathetic silence that makes itself respected, and all the people are as if at church. The sea bank, the silent sea bank, is daily growing to be a city of tents. You discern tents for miles, but you do not hear a single sound. Men do not even chop wood here. They find broken boughs of fallen forests and keep their camp-fires going without the sound of axe or hammer, a sort of Solomon's temple."
Crater Lake (called Giiwas by the local Klamath tribe) is in Oregon, USA. It was formed nearly 8,000 years ago when the volcano Mazama, the home of Llao of the Below World, collapsed during a battle against Skell of the Above World. At 1,949 ft (594 m), the lake is the deepst in the US and the 2nd-deepest in North America (behind Great Slave Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories) and is famous for its clarity and deep blue color; it was callled Deep Blue Lake by its discoverer, prrospector John Wesley Hillman, in 1853. It was subsequently renamed Blue Lake and Lake Majesty. William Gladstone Steel traveled to Ft. Klamath in 1885 and then walked the remaining 20 miles to the lake and began publicizing the site, naming many of its landmarks such as Wizard Island, Llao Rock, and Skell Head. With help from geologist Clarence Dutton, he organized an expedition to study the lake in 1886 and the area's topography. A decde later he hosted hundreds of people, including politicians and scentists, at a three-week convention and mountain climbing tour, which closed with the christening of the former volcano.Through Steel's relentless lobbying, president Theodore Roosevelt established Crater Lake National Park in 1902, the nation's sixth, and he later served as its superintendent for three years. Joaquin Miller, the renowned "Poet of the Sierras" -- a former Pony Express rider, mining-camp cook, horse thief, lawyer, and judge -- gave an early description: "The lake? The Sea of Silence?... I should like to let it alone, say nothing. It took such hold of my heart ... that I love it almost like one of my own family. But fancy a sea of sapphire set around by a compact circle of the great grizzly rock of Yosemite. It does not seem so sublime at first, but the mote is in your own eye. It is great, great, but it takes you days to see how great. It lies two thousand feet under your feet, and as it reflects its walls so perfectly that you cannot tell the wall from the reflection in the intensely blue water, you have a continuous and unbroken circular wall of twenty-four miles to contemplate at a glance, all of which lies two thousand feet, and seems to lie four thousand feet, below! Yet so bright, yet so intensely blue is the lake that it seems at times, from some points of view, to lift right in your face. In fact, the place has long been called by mountaineers, along with many other names, Spook Lake. The one thing that first strikes you after the color, the blue, blue, even to blackness, with its belt of green clinging to the bastions of the wall, is the silence, the Sunday morning silence, that broods at all times over all things. The huge and towering hemlocks sing their low monotone away up against the sky, but that is all you hear, not a bird, not a beast, wild or tame. It is not an intense silence, as if you were lost, but a sweet, sympathetic silence that makes itself respected, and all the people are as if at church. The sea bank, the silent sea bank, is daily growing to be a city of tents. You discern tents for miles, but you do not hear a single sound. Men do not even chop wood here. They find broken boughs of fallen forests and keep their camp-fires going without the sound of axe or hammer, a sort of Solomon's temple."
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