Swimming in Crater Lake

Several years ago I was interviewed by a young woman from Yale University who was writing a Ph.D. dissertation about our sense of place. One of her questions was, "Aside from your home, what is your favorite place in the world?" Here I am at my answer:

It's Crater Lake National Park, of course. I was there last week with my friend and hiking partner, Bob Cook. 

Crater Lake is technically not a crater but a caldera, a crater formed when a volcanic mountain collapses. Crater Lake's mountain was Mt. Mazama, which collapsed after its eruption 7700 years ago. Over the ensuing years and eons, the caldera filled with rain-water and snow-melt until it reached an equilibrium between that input and its evaporation. There is no other source of water  – thus Crater Lake's famous purity. 

The lake is a gorgeous 1949 feet deep, the ninth depest lake in the world, although it ought to be called the eighth deepest because Lake Vostok in Antarctica is 13,000 feet under ice so you can't swim in it so it shouldn't count. Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and misses being the deepest in North America, and the eighth deepest in the world, by only 66 feet. (Canada's Great Slave Lake is 2015 feet deep. I'm thinking about having it filled with 67 feet of dirt and rock.) Measuring by mean depth, Crater Lake is the third deepest in the world (and Great Slave Lake doesn't even rank) because the caldera's banks are so steep. The steepness above water indicates the steepness below water. All around, Crater Lake is deep, deep, deep.

That deepness accounts for the bueness. The guide on the boat explains that at great depths of water all colors of visible light are absorbed except blue. Or something like that. I get the general idea, but I have an alternative explanation: blue is the only color that can dive so deep and survive.

Crater Lake is not only blue, blue, blue; it is pure, pure, pure. It's so pure the pilot of the science boat I was on one year stopped in the middle of the lake so all the rangers could lean over the side of the boat and fill their water bottles.

The surface temperature of the lake generally lies between 50º and 60º. Nice. Very nice. I have swum in Crater Lake many times. I have also swum in the second deepest lake in the United States, Lake Tahoe, in California, and in the third deepest, Lake Chelan, in Washington. They are blue, too, but I can attest that Crater Lake is not only the deepest and the purist lake in the United States but also the bluest. You can gaze into its color for many long minutes and still not believe it. It is the bluest blue imaginable. It is the color of a summer sky when it's so hot the blue looks like it's on fire. At Chaski Falls, 1000 feet below Crater Lake Lodge, the guide talks about snowmelt and evaporation while the tour boat lingers in water that is such a rich turquoise I long to jump over the side of the boat into it. Bob holds onto me.

Our boat left its passengers on Wizard Island for a few hours so we could climb to the top of its cinder cone volcano. I was still preferring to do uphill hikes without my horrid boots, so I made the 755-foot climb barefooted. At the top I asked Bob how many people he thought had climbed Wizard Island barefooted. He said, "One." I wanted to climb down into the volcano's crater so I could say I had been inside a volcano inside a volcano, but the lava rocks were sharp on my feet, so I walked around the crater instead. I succumbed to boots three-quarters of the way around and wore them all the way back down the mountain.

I had just time for a swim in the little bay at the boat dock before the boat arrived. I put on my bathing suit and walked into the water, then submerged and started swimming. I swam deep into the blue, out to the end of the bay and into the bigness of Crater Lake. I swam into the blue-purple of gentians, then into water so deep blue it was almost black. I would have continued, on and on in that ecstasy of blue, except after ten minutes Bob hollered at me to come back so I wouldn't miss the boat. As I swam back, I took long sweet drinks of the water I was swimming in.