Crater Lake!

Shannon and I were hoping to get in one last National Park before heading back to Seattle for a little bit of a stay-cation before our European adventure begins.  We picked Crater Lake because of it's general proximity to the NorthWest and because neither of us had been there before... compelling reasons enough on a spontaneous road trip.

Our drive into Eastern Oregon showed two things:

1.  Eastern Oregon (basically until Crater Lake) is really boring.  We thought we were finished with driving like this so we weren't mentally prepared.  Hard times.

2.  It's fire season.  Oregon is currently ablaze with a lot of wild-fires and the smoke is drifting all over Crater Lake.  We learned a lot about fire management and how we more or less botched it in previous decades.  Those mistakes are making for intense fire seasons now.  It was a little spooky to look at a map and see that we were basically surrounded by fires.

3.  Crater Lake is pretty... even with a little smoke.  Definitely worth a stop, although not the most the stunning site we've seen, the geology is pretty interesting.  Basically a volcano erupted and collapsed on itself.  The lake is formed by snowmelt and rain alone.  There are no rivers in.  There are also no rivers out (it's in a volcano caldera).  This means the water is some of the purest in the world.  We enjoyed taking it in!