It was a beautiful day with beautiful scenery. We left the RV at 9:30 and headed the 20 miles to Crater Lake Nat’l Park. As we left the huge meadow-filled valley and started climbing through the fir forest, a tiny fawn came onto the road. He still had his spots. He bounced across the road, paused a second on the other side, and then went on into the woods. A good omen for a good day.
We reached the Rim Village Area at 10:25 thinking we had just made it for the 10:30 trolley ride around the rim with a ranger narrating, but the schedule in the paper was wrong, and the tour was at 11. We signed up, went to the gift shop for a road tour book of Crater Lake and also found one for Mt St Helens.
The tour was a little dry. Ranger Ross needs some help with his people skills. But the stops were amazing and the scenery awesome. The ride around the rim is 33 miles, and this tour took 2 hours. I think we would have been better off doing it ourselves, but Bill had wanted to do this. I did see a stellar Jay and a Clark’s nutcracker which was fun.
When we got back, we went to the big, old lodge for lunch. The service was awful, mostly because they were badly understaffed. We waited a half hour to be seated. Then Colby, our waiter, took forever to take our order, and then it was forever before it was brought to the table. And he forgot Bill’s ice tea altogether. The good thing was that the Monte Cristo sandwich I ordered was quite good. I hadn’t had one in years, and this was yummy with marion berry jelly. The final bit of idiocy was just as we were waiting for the bill, Colby came by and put down another helping of our original order. We told him we had already eaten once. Duh-oh!
Then we set off in the Tracker to drive the rim again, seeing everything from a different perspective and stopping when we wanted to stop. We took a 7 mile spur road to the end where we saw The Pinnacles – old fossil fumaroles created when gases escaped after an eruption. They were quite impressive.
It was already almost 5, but we had one more stop to make – Castle Crest Wildflower Garden trail. This is a half mile trail with tons of wildflowers all around and a stream meandering through the area. It would have been perfect except for the hordes of mosquitoes everywhere, but it was well worth it. I got lots of photos which I will upload after I get them processed.
Now we are back at the RV relaxing. Crater lake is truly an amazing sight, and its enormity cannot be expressed in words or photos. If you click on the photo to make it bigger, you can see the tiny white spot in the water beside me that is a fairly large tour boat. That gives some perspective!
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