The road snakes through a swath cut in a forest of tall sentinels. A scenic corridor illuminated with strobe beams of sunshine between oblique shadows slicing across the solid yellow line. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words and yet my photos won't do justice to what my eyes took in, and a thousand words - well, I would run out of superlatives.
Amongst the mountains around me once stood Mount Mazama, a volcanic power, bubbling and spewing oozing lava. God of creation and creativity gave a new landscape to this mountain about 7000 years ago in a violent eruption of pumice and ash. It shook to the point of implosion, forming a very deep caldera which over the centuries has filled with rain and snow. Standing on the rim of this 6 mile basin my eyes drank in a deep, rich blue pool, mirroring Wizard Island with it's tales of superstition and mysticism and the illusive phantom ship with it's rocky spires resembling sails. A thousand words? No, because they are locked in my memory bank.
This is what Stanton C Lapham said in 1931. "It is unlike any other natural wonder in the world. It is the Jewelled Sapphire of the Cascades, set in a matrix of peaks and castled walls; we my look upon it but once then wear in in our hearts forever." 
After driving almost all the way around Crater Lake we took an easy 3.2 Km hike to Plaikni Falls.
Another little stop was the Rogue Gorge, cool to see as we had just days earlier seen where the Rogue River which begins near Crater Lake empties into the Pacific Ocean.
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