2 weeks ago I drove from San Jose to Seattle in 2 days with Sinead, my best high school friend who I didn’t marry. We stayed overnight at an AirBnB in Klamath Falls, OR specifically so we could visit Crater Lake. Crater Lake is the caldera of a volcano filled by snow-melt, 2000 ft deep at its lowest point. It’s cold; I swam anyway*.
*Note: for truth in reporting, it took me about 20 minutes to get in the water. For the sake of our friendship, Sinead did not document my initial squawking and squealing. In my defense, the beach dropped off an underwater cliff that looked like the perfect home for woman-eating volcano-bred krakens. Seriously; look at the color difference between the shore and just 10 ft from it.
Because the water comes from snowmelt and not underground streams, it is unbelievably clear and blue. The pictures do it some justice, but it is well worth the winding roads to see it in person.
To get to the lake, we hiked down about 23 switchbacks, created and maintained by the National Park Service. I got to try out my Pano (don’t judge, I just got a new phone).
The view of the lake was incredible for the entire hike (we saw less of it on the way back, focusing on our feet and not dying from climbing up around 1000 vertical ft in 45 minutes).
Most of the other swimmers jumped off this cliff to get into the water; I intend to do this next time since it looked like a lot of fun. As it was, on this trip I had enough to deal with with the cold.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to force myself all the way under the cold, cold water, since I knew I had 10 hours of shared driving ahead of me. Then I thought about trying to explain hiking all the way down there and not diving in, and realized I needed to. It was not quite doing it for the Vine, but anticipated peer pressure did get me to do something really fun.
Inspirational Quote:
“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” ― John Muir
