Oregon Sanctuary of ‘Incomparable Beauty’ Turns 100

The birth of Crater Lake National Park 100 years ago was a long and difficult one, mostly because Congress in the 19th century thought its remote location made it a loser with tourists.

But a Kansas schoolboy’s fascination with the idea of a lake inside a volcano became an adult obsession, until the stars finally aligned and, on May 22, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the proclamation creating the nation’s fifth national park.

Crater Lake remains Oregon’s only national park, and the people who love it are celebrating. There is a one-man play about William Steel’s quest to save the lake from being overrun by herds of sheep, an art show depicting the lake in photos, sculpture, painting and pastels, books and a commemorative license plate.

“Crater Lake, in the Park Service family, is considered one of the crown jewels,” said George Buckingham, its retired chief ranger and a member of the board of Friends of Crater Lake, which is putting on some of the festivities.

Because of the park’s location at the crest of the snowy Cascade Range, the rededication ceremonies will wait until Aug. 24-25, when roads and trails are clear of snow. But an art show, lectures and performances of “Resolutions: William Gladstone Steel and Crater Lake National Park,” will be held at lower elevations.

Crater Lake lies atop an ancient volcano known as Mount Mazama, one of the huge cones that extend along the crest of the Cascades. Dormant now, Mazama erupted 7,000 years ago with a blast estimated at 42 times greater than that of Mount St. Helens.

As the underlying support for the mountain was lost, the walls of the volcano collapsed inward, forming a caldera. Over the course of several hundred years, rain and snow filled the basin to a depth of 1,943 feet, making it the nation’s deepest lake.

Crater Lake was a place of power for the Klamath tribe for thousands of years. They witnessed the eruption, immortalizing it in a story of a battle between the powerful monster who lived in the mountain, Lao, and Skell, a mythical hero. Young men who wanted to be shamans ran down the steep caldera wall and dove into the cold water at night to see the spirits that lived at the bottom of the lake.

It was not discovered by white men until June 12, 1853, when a party of prospectors stumbled upon it while looking for gold. They called it Blue Lake, in homage to its incredibly blue color, the result of the water’s purity and depth.

“I knew when I gazed upon Crater Lake that even though the West was filled with undiscovered wonders, Crater Lake would hold its own,” John Wesley Hillman would say later.

But it was largely forgotten until 1885, when an Army expedition went to the lake to study the geology.

Steel told people he learned of Crater Lake in a newspaper used to wrap a sandwich for school. When he moved from Kansas to Portland as a young man, he could find few people who had even heard of the place. He joined the 1885 Army expedition, and went back to Portland determined to make Crater Lake a national park.

President Grover Cleveland ordered a portion of what is now the park withdrawn from development in 1886, but Steel would stalk the halls of Washington for 16 more years before seeing his dream come true.

A scandal over Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park, made Congress skittish, and Crater Lake’s remote location, with no railroad or roads, left lawmakers skeptical that it would be anything but a drain on the treasury, said park historian Steve Mark.

Sierra Club founder John Muir was indifferent, preferring his beloved Yosemite Valley in California. Even after Crater Lake was made a park and Steel stocked the lake with trout to attract tourists, Western writer Zane Gray found them puny from lack of food.

But “Call of the Wild” author Jack London called Crater Lake “incomparable in beauty” after his 1911 visit. And Charles Lindbergh flew over the lake in 1927.

The greatest threats in Steel’s time were logging and herds of grazing sheep, but now the threats can come from far away. Toxic dust from Chinese industrial pollution can be carried across the ocean by the wind, for example, fouling the park’s pristine air.

“That’s one of the difficult things about being in what we call the forever business,” said Mac Brock, the park’s natural resources officer. “It’s very difficult to see what is going to rear its head.”

The park spent $625,000 in recent years to eradicate Eastern brook trout from Sun Creek so they would not wipe out the native bull trout, a threatened species and the only native fish in the park.

Now Brock is worried about alien plants, such as spotted knapweed and Klamath weed, which are gradually marching up from the valley floor, pushing out the native wildflowers.

Looking into the 21st century, park Supt. Chuck Lundy sees the park taking on a new role as a center of scientific research and education, from elementary school to postgraduate study.

He hopes to see what had been the superintendent’s residence, unused for 25 years, converted into the headquarters of the Crater Lake Science and Learning Center. The old naturalist’s residence would be living space for visiting scientists.

This summer, the Sinnott Memorial overlook is reopening with $500,000 in new exhibits on geology and history. The nearby Kaiser Photography Studio has been renovated, as has the Community House, where rangers will hold evening campfire talks.

Plans anticipate $8 million in changes, including moving the Rim Village parking back so that cars no longer dominate the view, renovating the cafeteria and gift shop in their original 1928 edifice, and building a two-story visitor center tall enough to see over the snowbanks to the lake beyond in winter.

Because of a winter that lasts from September to June, Crater Lake has been a hardship post. But by the time Buckingham retired after 11 years here, it had become his favorite park.

“As chief ranger, I spent an awful lot of time in the office, with meetings, budgeting, counseling,” he said. “And every now and then I’d go up on the rim and say, ‘This is why I put up with all of this.’ I took care of something really important for a time.”