ABSTRACT
Crater Lake National Park was set aside three years after Mount Rainier. Just as Mount Rainier is the mightiest mountain in the United States outside of Alaska, Crater Lake might be thought of as the most beautiful lake in the world, for no other lake could be so beautiful. Other lakes have more beautiful surrounding rims or shores—Lake Louise in Banff National Park, Canada, and Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, for instance—but in its lovely, clear, unbelievably blue water Crater Lake stands alone. It lies in the crater of a great extinct volcano, formed by a mighty explosion which blew off the top of Mount Mazama, and gets its deep blue color from its great depth— nearly 2,000 feet. The water in the lake comes altogether from rain and from the 50 feet, or even up to 70 feet, of snow that falls in the crater every year, for no river flows into the lake or out of it. The amount of water from rain and from melting snow is greater than the evaporation, which indicates that there is some sort of subterranean leakage, for the level of the lake remains constant. There were no fish in the lake until 1888, when William Gladstone Steel brought some rainbow trout up from Medford. It has been said that Steel carried about two dozen small fish in a pail, walking the distance in three days, stopping at springs on the way to change the water, and at night burying the bucket at the edge of a stream in such a way that the water could flow in and out, but the fish could not escape. He reached the lake with half his fish alive. For years he worked on the problem of finding the right food for them, for there was no other life in the lake. 1
