71 miles NE of Medford, 83 miles E of Roseburg, 60 miles N of Klamath Falls
Nothing in the forests of the southern Oregon Cascades prepares you for Crater Lake. There are no preliminaries, no teasing glimpses through the trees. You drive through a rather unremarkable mountain forest, wondering why this place was ever made into a national park, and then, with little warning and no fanfare, you arrive at the edge of a cliff and gaze down 1,000 feet to a circular bowl of water a mesmerizing shade of sapphire blue. The view takes your breath away (or is it the elevation?), and you quickly understand why this lake became a national park way back in 1902.
At 1,932 feet deep, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States (and the seventh deepest in the world). The crater (or, more accurately, the caldera) that holds the serene lake was born in an explosive volcanic eruption 7,700 years ago. When the volcano, now known as Mount Mazama, erupted, its summit (thought to have been around 12,000 ft. high) collapsed, leaving a crater 4,000 feet deep. Thousands of years of rain and melting snow turned the empty heart of this volcano into today's cold, clear lake, which today is surrounded by crater walls that in places are nearly 2,000 feet tall. Toward one end of the lake, the cone of Wizard Island rises from the lake. This island is the tip of a new volcanic peak that has been building slowly since Mount Mazama's last eruption.
