A trip to the deepest lake in the US: Crater Lake

Crater lake with Wizard Island

One of the best places to visit in Oregon is Crater lake. It is the first deepest lake in USA and seventh deepest lake in the world. This place has a good combination of deep pure blue water, sheer surrounding cliffs, almost two thousand feet high, two picturesque islands, and a violent volcanic past. It was formed about 77000 years back when mount Mazama collapsed due to huge volcanic eruption. It is 592 m deep and it doesn't have any inlet and outlets. Water is collected as snow and is removed by evaporation seepage.

It is about 3 hours drive from Corvallis. We were altogether 2 dozens of friends. It was the idea of not being "lab rat" and getting fun and good time with nature and its beauty at least during the weekend.

Our expedition team:2 of our team members are not here.

Did you bring any fish or water from the Lake?

We headed up there Friday evening and ended up to Diamond lake camping area and returned to Corvallis on Sunday. Diamond lake was our base camp(like we are going to the top of the world 'Mt. Everest' and 'Namche' is base camp there). sounds interesting....? That was my first time of spending night inside tents. Actually it was fun....how? by not getting enough sleep? at least we had 2 night close contact with nature. is that true? I think so.

My little nice house for two nights

Add caption

Here is one more photo(right) from the camping site. यो धूनी बालेर भजन गाएको होइना है। It was fire work for making our dinner. We made camping special with banana, chocolate and marshmallow. That was tasty. I don't know the name. Susie knows it, doesn't you Susie? We listened some interesting short stories from friends about something that happened in their life. That gave me the memory of my childhood listening stories from my grand mom. However the stories were different and were relevant to the culture and society of that time and place.

Saturday we went for hiking. The main hiking route was 3 hours mountain trail. Everybody was excited and interested for the hiking. It was cold morning and there was no clear sun. We were at the summit of the mountain at around noon. The Crater lake was surrounded by cloud and we had to wait for a while to see it. The cloud sometime uncovered the lake and gave us chance to see and take pictures.

Ready for the mountain trail hiking?

Second hiking route was a short trail around wild flowers. And third was all the down way hiking trail to Crater Lake. We did fishing but were not able to catch any fish. As the lake was formed by the collection of water in the bowl like structure created by volcano, there are no native fish in this lake. The water is so pure that it is blue and doesn't have enough natural food for fish in it. I think thats why population of fish is very low.

worthless try but was fun, is that true Juan?

As I mentioned above, our base camp was diamond lake. It is also a beautiful lake 45 min drive from Crater lake. We did kayaking on the diamond lake at evening. That was wonderful time in the diamond lake. That was also my first Kayaking. It was surrounded by conifer forest. You can see mountains with snow. No noise at all and time after sunset. I enjoyed a lot. Sunday morning most of us did swimming on the diamond lake.

Jill and I Kayaking on Diamond Lake

To comment on this blog, please click on "comments" below.

A memorable summer trip to Seattle, Washington

I visited one of the big cities of United States of America, Seattle, with my friends on second weekend of July. After coming to the USA, I had traveled to Reno, NV and San Francisco, CA. This is my second time visiting big cities of the USA. Corvallis, where I live, is a very small city and it does not give me a feeling that I am in USA. That's why I wanted to visit some of the big cities.

We were 9 people from Corvallis, Reno and Portland. Lekh, Krishna and Madhu traveled all the way from Reno. They drove all the way to Corvallis-Portland-Seattle. I, Kailash, Rama and Maya from Corvallis. Girish and Sarita joined us from Portland.

Just below the Space Needle

From left Maya, Sarita, Rama, Lekh(front),Kailash, Basant, Girish and Madhu. 

I want to mention three places in Seattle. The first is Space needle. It was made in 1962 and is 184 meters high (as I remember), it has a restaurant at the top. You can see whole City in 360 degree. The architecture of the needle is really nice. We were able to see the evening and night scene of the city from it. The city was beautiful in the night light.

Space Needle

From Top of the Space Needle to Downtown Seattle

Feri (?) riding and cruise riding were exciting to me. It was my first time to have such rides on sea bay area. It was real fun. The Feri took us to one of the islands from near by Farmers market. It was about 1.45 hours ride altogether.That was a big feri which could carry 2000 people and 200 cars. Next day, we took Cruise ride. That was 1 hour ride and they explained all about the city during the ride.

The third thing I want to mention is Museum of flight. It contains all the historical events/things about airplane and space shuttle. It is really a good place to visit and know about the history of plane/space industry. We didn't have enough time to see all the stuffs there. So I suggest you to save more time for Museum of flight if you are planning to visit it in near future.

First Nepali astronaut in Space...............do you believe it?

Other places we visited: Zoo, Science center, Aquarium, Pikes market. We didn't visit old city i.e. underground city area.

One more picture...

I don't know why these two girls were interested to take pictures with these Nepali guys.