Day 88: Prospect, OR (cont.)

Still in Prospect, OR

Before I get started, I need to correct something that I posted yesterday. I said that the Rogue River gets it start in Crater Lake. We learned today that Crater Lake has no inlets or outlets. It only loses water through evaporation and it only gets new water from precipitation. Its only watershed is the very steep inside of the crater. The Rogue, Klamath and Umpqua Rivers all start in the National Park but their watersheds are on the outside of the crater.

Our first stop today was the Crater Lake National Park Visitors Center where we watched a very good film about the lake and its history. About 7700 years ago, recent enough that the Klamath Indian oral histories tell of the event, the magma chamber miles under a large volcano called Mt. Mazama exploded. Somehow the new vents that were created were in a circle around the sides of the mountain. The stone between the new vents soon cracked and, when the mountain could no longer support its own weight, it collapsed into the magma chamber. They say that this all happened over the span of a few hours.

The resulting 1900 foot deep basin was then filled by nothing more than centuries of rainfall and snowfall. Since there are no streams to bring in impurities, they say that the water in Crater Lake is the purest in the World.

The island in the middle of Crater Lake is called Wizard Island. It is a volcano that erupted after the lake started to fill and has grown large enough to peek above the surface.

On our way back toward Prospect, we stopped to take a short 1/4 mile hike that offered a number of good views of the Rogue River Gorge.

This is looking downstream below the Gorge:

Looking down into the very narrow Gorge. The sign said that the water that passes through here in one minute would fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.

Looking across the Gorge at 2 lava tubes. The top one is easy to spot. The one closer to the waterline as a large boulder blocking most of the opening.

Looking upstream at the top of the Gorge:

From the same spot, looking over the first drop.

Our next stop was another short hike to see a spot called Natural Bridge. We didn't know what to expect going in but Natural Bridge is a spot where the entire river flows through a series of lava tubes.

Looking upstream toward the tubes (not in this shot):

Looking downstream from that same location:

Here's the river flowing into one of the tubes (we never did figure out where exactly it came out again):

Just upstream from that last spot, the river comes out of another tube:

Finally, we took a longer hike to see this waterfall called Mill Creek Falls. This location is downstream from the dam that we visited yesterday. All of the other locations that I mentioned today are upstream from the dam.

-J-