Crater Lake Rim Drive

About 7,700 years ago, a roughly 12,000-foot volcano called Mount Mazama erupted in one of the largest blasts the region has ever seen, emptying its magma chamber so violently that the whole summit collapsed inward. What was left was not a crater in the usual sense but a caldera, a vast circular basin where a mountaintop used to be.

Over the centuries that followed, snowmelt and rain slowly filled the basin. With no streams flowing in to carry sediment and no outlet flowing away, the water grew extraordinarily deep and clear. Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States, plunging close to two thousand feet, and its clarity is what gives it that famous, almost electric blue.

Rim Drive runs about 33 miles all the way around the caldera, with eight main viewing areas and around fifteen smaller pullouts, so the whole point is to go slowly and stop often. The road rides between roughly 6,500 feet and nearly 7,900 feet at its high point near Cloudcap, and every turn frames the lake from a new angle.

The road you drive was surveyed and graded in the early 1930s and finished, with help from the Civilian Conservation Corps, over the following decade. Favorite stops ring the rim: the Sinnott Memorial and Discovery Point on the south side, the Watchman lookout and Merriam Point to the west, Cloudcap and Skell Head high on the east, and Kerr Notch to the southeast. Only one trail, the steep switchbacks at Cleetwood Cove, leads down to the water itself.

Two features rise out of the lake and draw every eye. Wizard Island is a near-perfect cinder cone that pushed up after the caldera formed, a small volcano within the volcano, dark green with trees against the blue. In summer, when boats run from Cleetwood Cove, you can sometimes land and climb it.

Off the southeastern shore stands the Phantom Ship, a craggy island of old lava that looks, from the right angle and in the right light, exactly like a small ghostly sailing vessel. It is far older than the eruption, a piece of the ancient mountain that survived the collapse.

Long before any road, the Klamath people knew this mountain and its lake, and they hold it sacred to this day. Their tradition tells of a great struggle between Llao, a spirit of the world below, and Skell, a spirit of the world above, a battle that ended with the mountain's destruction and the making of the caldera. Names around the rim, like Llao Rock and Skell Head, still carry that story.

The lake was largely unknown to newcomers until 1853, when a small party of prospectors stumbled onto the rim. Decades of advocacy, led by the tireless William Gladstone Steel, finally made Crater Lake a national park in 1902, the fifth in the country. It remains a place many visitors describe less as scenery than as something closer to awe.

The forests around the rim are home to black bears, elk, mule deer, and the bold Clark's nutcracker and gray jay that work the pullouts for scraps. Marmots and ground squirrels sun themselves on the rocks, and in the clear lake itself live introduced trout and salmon, since the water held no fish before people brought them.

Snow rules the calendar here. Winter buries the rim under many feet of it, and Rim Drive usually opens fully only from about July into October, with the far north and east sections the last to clear. Late summer and early fall bring the most reliable weather and the fewest closures, though a cold, sudden squall is possible any month at this altitude.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.