Crescent Lake & Odell Lake

Both lakes were named in July 1865 by the surveyors Byron Pengra and William Odell, who were laying out the Oregon Central Military Road across the Cascades. Crescent Lake took its name from its crescent-moon shape, and Odell Lake carries the surveyor’s own name. The road they scouted became, in time, the route of Highway 58.

Twelve years earlier, this high country nearly swallowed a wagon train. In 1853 a promoter named Elijah Elliott talked roughly a thousand emigrants, in some 250 wagons, onto a ‘free emigrant road’ over Willamette Pass that had not actually been finished. The train was stranded in the mountains for weeks until a rescue party reached them from the valley below. It is remembered as the Lost Wagon Train of 1853.

What finally opened the lakes to travelers was the railroad. The Southern Pacific spent two decades pushing its Cascade line over the pass, boring a summit tunnel and completing the crossing in 1926. Stations appeared at the lakes, the little community at Crescent Lake was surveyed within months of the first train, and lodges and resorts followed.

People have been drawn here far longer than that. At the south end of Odell Lake, archaeologists documented an early campsite, stone points buried beneath a layer of volcanic pumice, evidence of hunters here in the distant past. These are the homelands of the Molalla, who ranged the western Cascade slopes, and the Klamath to the south. The two peoples traded, intermarried, and gathered at the high huckleberry grounds of the Cascades, where the berries were prized enough to carry down and trade.

Both lakes are the work of ice. During the last ice age, glaciers grinding down the east flank of the High Cascades carved these deep basins and then dammed them with moraines, ridges of rock and rubble bulldozed to the edge of the ice. When the glaciers melted, the basins filled. Odell Lake reaches about 282 feet deep and Crescent about 265, which is part of why they stay so cold and clear.

The peaks around them are volcanoes worn down by that same ice. Diamond Peak, at 8,748 feet, stands just to the west in its own wilderness, its flanks scooped into cirques and bowls. Maiden Peak and Odell Butte rise nearby, and Willamette Pass itself crosses the crest at just over 5,100 feet.

Odell Lake is famous among anglers for its trophy lake trout, or mackinaw. A state-record mackinaw of more than forty pounds was pulled from these waters in 1984, and the record still stands. Each fall, kokanee salmon turn crimson and run up Trapper Creek at the west end of the lake to spawn. Crescent Lake adds brown trout to the mix. Both lakes hold native mountain whitefish as well, and Odell shelters threatened bull trout, which are protected and closed to fishing.

Odell Lake is a noted spot for bald eagles, especially in fall, and ospreys fish both lakes through the summer. In the surrounding forest, watch for the Canada jay, the Clark’s nutcracker prying seeds from the cones, and the bold Steller’s jay, with woodpeckers and nesting western tanagers among the pines.

The woods are lodgepole pine and mountain hemlock, home to mule deer, black bear, and the Pacific marten, a sleek, tree-hunting weasel of dense old forest. The understory fills with huckleberry and beargrass, and lupine colors the openings in summer.

Summer is the heart of the season: swimming and picnicking at Simax Beach on Crescent Lake, boating and paddling on both, and fishing all day. Odell Lake is known for strong, dependable afternoon winds that funnel through the low gap of Willamette Pass, which has long made it a destination for sailors and windsurfers.

Fall brings the kokanee run and a deep quiet as the crowds thin, good for fishing and camping in the cooling air.

Winter turns the pass into snow country. The Willamette Pass ski area runs downhill and Nordic trails, and sno-parks along Highway 58 open the area to cross-country skiing and snowmobiling. A state sno-park permit is required in the snowy months.

Spring is ice-out and snowmelt, when the creeks run high and the high country slowly reopens.

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