Day Trippin' #2: Oregon's Crater Lake National Park

This Day Trippin' series began with Smith Rock State Park, a rock-climber's and photographer's paradise. Visit the second lens, a journey to the beautiful Oregon Coast.

1. How often do you get to see a lake formed in the crater of an ancient collapsed volcano?

2. Take your choice of camping or staying in an historic lodge or a hotel.

3. Hike through lush, Old Growth forest.

4. Learn fascinating facts about the park, including how fire helps maintain a healthy relationship between the forest and surrounding land.

5. Discover that material possessions, no matter how much you like them, are not your richest asset.

6. Just outside the park, you can sign up for river rafting excursions lasting a half day or several days. Experience whitewater rafting at its best.

7. The Pacific Crest Trail passes through seven national parks, including Crater Lake. If you wish to hike and stay overnight, get a backcountry permit.

8. Scuba divers discover the deepest lake in the United States, and one of the clearest freshwater lakes in the world.

9. Crater Lake National Park receives over 500 inches of snow each year. Winter lasts nine full months. (Skiiers, are you listening?)

10. Avid bicyclists love the most popular bicycle route at Crater Lake--the 33-mile Rim Drive.

Please note: All photographs in my Day Trippin' series of lenses are ©Bonnie Bruno 2009 unless otherwise noted.

If you're heading to Crater Lake, be sure to take a jacket. Although it may be sunny and warm, the wind can shift over the frigid water and stir up quite a chill. Better to be prepared than to shiver.

I love reading the impressions of visitors to Crater Lake. Louis Macpherson, a Canadian writer, describes it this way, in an travel piece he wrote for TheStar.com:

To see the lake is to know the colour sapphire as God must have imagined it. Almost 600 metres deep (the deepest lake in the U.S. and seventh deepest on Earth) and 10 kilometres wide, it is so pure that light penetrates the first 130 metres. The edges of the rim are just as perilous as the Grand Canyon with a 300- to 600-metre vertical drop into water that is incomprehensibly cold.