Crater Lake To Stanley, Day 0 : Curiosity 2

I’ve never been to Crater Lake, and even though I’m dead-on-my-feet tired (which is no way to start a bike tour), I notice that there are daily boat tours of the surface of the lake – a great way to see it up close and personal. The catch is, you need to walk some 500 feet down from the rim of the crater, on a steep switchback trail, to get to the boat launch. Dad graciously agrees to hang around while I go on the tour, and he drives around exploring the rim to kill some time. Meanwhile, I slog down the trail, slapping at hundreds of mosquitoes, with my camera held in one fist.

From the head of the trail, looking down the steep sides of the crater, I can see the water between the trees. It reflects the color of the sky so perfectly that the only way I can tell it’s water is by the ripples from the wind.

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Further down the trail, the lake fills up more of the space between the ground and the sky. If you hold your hand up in front of your eyes and cover the far wall of the canyon, the lake becomes the sky. It’s pretty weird.

Pollen on Crater Lake
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Pollen on Crater Lake

The lake is enormous. During the boat ride, I asked the guide why the crater didn’t just fill up, then overflow, and erode a channel in some part of the cliff wall, destroying the lake. He replied that there are several theories of why this didn’t happen, but the most popular one involves the porous nature of some of the volcanic deposits. Above a certain level, the water meets the edges of these deposits and seeps through, forming springs along the outer face of the mountain.

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Close up, the pollen on the lake surface looks like an impressionist painting of night sky.

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The crater is also home to many squirrely friends.

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Looking up the cliff face, from the bottom of the trail.

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A close look at the pollen in the lake.

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The first of two tour-boats active on the lake.

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Our tour guide, pausing between comments over the loudspeaker.

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The inside wall of the crater is home to some bizarre geography.

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This brutal terrain would make a good cover for a Metal album.

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The water is shockingly blue and clear. The guide says it’s the clearest water on the entire continent.

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The walls can be very sheer, unlike other lakes that have been eroded by strong current or big changes in the surface level.

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The layers are a geologist’s dream – or nightmare.

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The clouds seem too low, because the altitude of the lake is abnormally high. The water is uniquely clear and still, and reflects the clouds strangely.

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This is Ghost Ship Island, the smaller of the two islands in Crater Lake. It’s made of some very odd rock.

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Here’s the island from another angle.

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The silhouette of this island is quite remarkable.

Looking up at the island in the center of Crater Lake.
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Looking up at the island in the center of Crater Lake.

See that dark blue edge on the water there, between the foreground and the background, starting at the corner of the island? There’s a cliff under the water there. The lake is much deeper beyond the cliff, so you can see more water below, and more reflected sunlight.

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That formation on the right is called the “Pumice Castle” by the tourguides. I’d love to climb down to it, but the route would probably be very difficult. I can’t help imagining that there’s a door in it leading to some kind of medieval theme park.

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Crater Lake To Stanley, Day 0 : Amusement

About ten minutes before the train pulls in, almost all the senior citizens on the train get up, gather their belongings, and file downstairs to wait in line by the doors. It truly is like my Dad says: “They have nothing better to do.”

As Dad is driving me up to Crater Lake, he regales me with some of his Baja stories.

“Did I tell you about the time I almost got robbed by banditos?”

“What? No, you didn’t.”

“Well, I heard stories about how bandits would sometimes line their cars up across the road and just wait for people to come along, and take all their stuff. So I thought I would try and fake them out. I got this little hand-speaker from a radio set, like the police use, and I put a holder for it on the dashboard, and just screwed the wire down under the instrument panel. I figured if I got stopped, I could pretend like I was talking into that and the banditos would think I had backup, and they would get in trouble if they messed with me.”

“That’s pretty silly.”

“Sure, but it worked! I was driving along, and ahead of me I saw a bunch of cars blocking the road, and four or five guys standing around. When I got close I saw a couple of them were wearing scarves and had guns. So I picked up my little handset and pressed the button, and looked at the guys with a very serious expression, and pretended like I was talking to somebody. The guy in the front saw me, and he looked over at his friend, and then he looked over at his other friend, and they talked for a minute, and then one of them got into a car and backed it up, and the guy waved me through.”

“Oh come on! You’re kidding!”

“Nope. Not kidding.”

“Did I tell you about the trip where I had giant tires on the truck? Big old balloon tires?”

“You know, I remember you mentioned it once but I never heard the details.”

“I had these huge tires. They were also very wide.”

“What did you do when a truck came along? Did someone have to go into the ditch?”

“Well there wasn’t usually a ditch but there was a shoulder. One of us – both of us, usually – would just climb up onto the shoulder, and go around.”

“But wasn’t the shoulder a lot rougher than the road? You’d wreck your tires.”

“Oh they would roll over almost anything.”

“How about cactus plants?”

“Well, I steered around those.”

“Get any flats?”

“Oh at least nine or ten.”

“Hahahahaha! You must have spent half your time fixing flats!”

“I got really good at it. I had this jack; very good design. Made it easy. Lift up the truck, take off the wheel, set it down, then lower the axle over the rim, and use it to lever off the tire. Patch the hole, lever it back, raise the axle, put the wheel back on, and drive.”

“You know, this bike trip of yours sounds exciting. If I was younger and had a bike, I’d want to come along with you! … Well, on the other hand, I’d have to look at your itinerary.”

“You can always do what La plans to do, and ride along as a ‘support vehicle’, meeting me at each destination.”

“That’s a good idea. But we’re doing this cruise right now. Maybe on your next trip?”

“Maybe. Ever since I saw that bicyclist doing the Alaskan highway, I’ve wondered if I could try something like that. But I’d definitely want a support vehicle, since some of the hills further up are really nasty. Are you guys interested in a return to Alaska some time?”

“Sure. Let’s talk about it. But we’re booked up for this year…”

We approach the entrance kiosk for the Crater Lake park.

“Huh, looks like they want ten dollars to get in,” I say.

“Oh yeah? Let’s see if my ‘Senior Card’ works.”

Dad digs around in his wallet and comes up with a dog-eared, somewhat blurry card. He holds it out to the woman at the kiosk window.

She waves us in. “Have a good visit!” Dad puts the card away and drives on.

“Well aren’t you Mr. Fancy Pants!” I declare.

Dad arches his eyebrows and sniffs aristocratically. “I know,” he says.

In a parking lot near the rim of Crater Lake, I get out my camera, so Dad gets out his:

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Crater Lake To Stanley, Day 0 : Curiosity 1

My loop of piano music and my face-mask is giving me brief flashes of sleep, but the vet sitting next to me puts a stop to that by jabbing me in the ribs. I pull up my sleep mask and say, “Eh??” He points across me, out the window.

The dark triangle of Mt Shasta is sailing slowly across the horizon, east of the train. Graceful ribbons of snow still curve down from its near peak. As I watch, the mountain rotates a little more, and the second peak of Shasta swings into view. “That’s funny,” I say, “I didn’t know Shasta had two peaks.”

“Well, the near peak is usually the only one you can see from Highway 5, and the far peak is the one you can see from Klamath Falls,” explains the vet.

“Ah.”

As we continue to skirt the mountain, we pass through vast hills of of sharp, porous black rock. No plants grow on it; no soil is mixed with it. It looks like the surface of an inhospitable alien world. “Man, I’d hate to trip and fall on that stuff,” I say. The vet chuckles.

I watch the hills for a while longer, then get tired of them and start looking around the train. In the seats to my left sit a sun-tanned man and his sleeping daughter. The man is slowly whittling the rough edges of a large rectangle of wood – a chain link. The link is attached to others, hanging down to the floor. Apparently he passed the night by carving a wooden chain out of a solid block. Perhaps he’ll sell it to a knickknack shop when he arrives in Klamath Falls.

Crater Lake To Stanley, Day -1 : Curiosity

I never did learn the vet’s name, but I did hear all kinds of personal details about his health problems. Most of them did not stem from the war, actually, but from an accident he got into while driving a taxi in San Francisco. Complications from the long recovery left a wound on his ankle that wouldn’t heal. He might have lost his foot, except an impetuous surgeon transplanted a chunk of muscle out of his leg and over the wounded area, creating a sort of living bandage with a circulatory system.

He took off his left shoe and showed the lump of muscle to me. It was a thick grey bulge near the top of his foot, visible in flashes from the Sacramento streetlamps as they shot past the train.

He’s about as old as my own father, but has far inferior health. Crazy what a few seconds of lapsed judgement in a taxi can do … so many years of his life affected by it… But that’s the way everything works, I guess.

I’ll ruminate on this many times during the bike tour. It will come naturally to mind as I’m pedaling in a three-foot gap of pavement between sheer cliffs and speeding metal monsters.

Crater Lake To Stanley, Day -1 : Amusement

Mr. Breakpoint rushes me to the train station Speed Racer style. I walk inside with all my luggage prepared on my back, and my ticket in hand. Of course, that’s when the attendant tells me that the train is running almost an hour late. I should have expected that.

When I get on board, I am seated behind a young man yammering on his cellphone. He stays on it for the next four hours, even switching seats temporarily to plug in and charge. After the first hour, a tough old man with a walking stick and an Army cap boards the train, and is assigned the seat next to me. We both try to sleep. Four or five stops later he gets up and goes wandering around the train. When he comes back, he passes the young man yapping on the phone, and makes a face like, “Duuuh!!” at me. I laugh. We can’t believe he is STILL on the phone.

Since we won’t be getting any sleep, the vet and I start talking. He tells me about the time he spent in Vietnam, doing night-time tank battles. He throws me a bunch of jargon about how they redesigned the tanks over the years to minimize both the exhaust vent from firing, and the muzzle flash. Apparently the muzzle flash at night was so conspicuous that it was easier to target than anything seen during the day. “So of course, the first rule was, fire and then move immediately,” he says.

“That’s funny,” I say, “because there are kids playing computer games today who learned the same tactic.”

“Oh but they don’t learn what it’s really like. Not really.”

“Well, yeah. For one thing, they don’t crap their pants with fear when they hear return fire.”

He laughs. “Well I never crapped my pants, but, I sure paid attention all right.”