Ranger Ashley paints a dramatic picture of the depth of crater lake as we tour the lake by boat. She pulls out a picture of the Statue of Liberty, then puts a picture of the Washington monument directly over that and with her third arm, (I don’t know how else she could have stacked the three pictures) she puts a picture of the Eiffel Tower directly on top of that. She says there is still room for twenty more Ashley’s. It is a good piece of showmanship. But the whole story is literally much bigger than that.
We ride in what was once the magma chamber of an giant volcano. The altitude of the lake surface is about 7000 feet. Before the caldera collapsed, it rose over 12000 feet in the air. From deepest point of the lake to top of the caldera is about 7000 feet. The day is grey and haze from the smoke of distant fires obscures the far shore line. The farthest diameter rim to rim is SIX miles. That makes a magma chamber of six miles by almost a mile and a half. By my estimates that is over 100 cubic miles of magma. Imagine the magnitude of the eruption when the magma chamber emptied and the caldera collapsed to form the current crater! We are told the ash from the eruption would have covered the state of Oregon.
We push on as we circumnavigate the shore of the lake, the wind picking up, the waves growing and spraying the passengers, the haze now obscuring all but the nearest shoreline. The boat stops over an underwater cliff to demonstrate the effect that depth has on the intense blueness of the water. Ashley supports her argument with another chart showing the absorption of other colors with depth in the water.
The ocean is deeper but is not quite the pure blue of this lake. I speculate that the clarity of this lake that has no rivers feeding into it to muddy the waters has something to do with it. At another stop we learned that the lake measured the greatest clarity ever recorded. The ocean has all kinds of things floating in it that might reflect back longer wave length colors affecting the pureness of the blue.
Crater lake is a stunning piece of scenery, with its sheer walls, pure blue water, and the caldera within the crater, the kind that you can never unsee. Sure, as my son suggests, maybe five minutes is enough to appreciate its beauty. To be in the crater on the lake learning statistics and natural history adds depth to the experience. Take the time to soak in this majestic place.