Day 42 - A Three-Hour Tour

We drove back to Crater Lake NP to take on a mid-morning hike at Annie’s Creek, which was billed as a moderate trail graced by tall pines along a creek side loop. We walked 1.5 miles just trying to find the trailhead (there happened to be lots of construction going on, or at least that’s the trail guide’s excuse). With no luck there we returned to the car and drove up to Crater Lake Lodge at the rim for lunch.

After lunch and a little more walking/sightseeing, we drove to the other side of the lake to Cleetwood Cove, which is where the Crater Lake Boat Tour embarked. The cove itself was accessed by a 1.1-mile switchback trail from the rim of the crater down to the lake I signed up for this months ago because well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The hike down and back were strenuous because of the elevation drop, but we managed it fine. The boat tour, however, was a different story. If you’ve seen pictures of migrants packed into open-air boats in the Mediterranean, you get the general idea, except most of us were Anglos. The sun beat down on us (we never thought they’d not have roofs), and we started looking at the clocks on our iPhones about 20 minutes into the two-hour trip. The captain said very little but the park ranger narrated the tour, with almost every sentence referring to some geological fact going back millions of years. That’s okay for about 10 minutes, but after that we had the urge to take up a collection asking him to stop talking. About 90 minutes in, we saw the light at the end of the tunnel as the cruise began to finally make its way to the docks. But noooooo --- the captain whispers something to the ranger who then announces we are going back to help a boat in distress, which happened to be another Crater Lake Tour Boat. It was bobbing up and down against the crater wall and everyone on board was wearing life jackets, prepped for the worst. Our captain threw them a line and we towed them back across the longest section of lake at about 2 MPH. So the two-hour tour became a three. We half expected them to charge us more for the extra time, but they discounted our fees by half, so we thought that was the best part of the day.

Other than that, another day in paradise, as Crater Lake National Park was one of the prettiest of the eight we’ve seen so far.

On to Bend, OR.