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hurl9e9y9 t1_it05k2s wrote

Reply to comment by IrNinjaBob in Deep blue spot near Wizard Island, Oregon [OC] (4032x3024) by CommonLurker2

You can also swim in it if you walk down Cleetwood Cove trail to the "beach" or take the boat to Wizard Island. It's chilly but also somewhat terrifying since the walls of the collapsed volcano you can see above the water also continue down at that same angle below the surface. So you can swim out ten or twenty feet and have nothing below you for hundreds of feet.

Extraordinarily pure and clear water so you can see very far in it, as well as the view of the gigantic walls around you. A good reminder of how incredibly infinitesimal we are. I've been a lot of places and seen a lot of stuff, but nothing else so far really compares to Crater Lake.

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IrNinjaBob t1_it0c9dn wrote

I've done the short yet somewhat steep hike down Cleetwood Cove trail, but didn't go swimming. Well worth it just for the views from the rocky beach. Have yet to actually boat to Wizard Island, but I imagine that would be quite the spectacle itself.

But honestly, enough can't be said about the clearness of the water for those that haven't been. The lake is entirely fed by rainfall and snow melt, with no rivers or streams feeding into it at all. So neat to see in something so incredibly large.

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hurl9e9y9 t1_it0fqb2 wrote

Also, for those interested in the measurement and study of the lake water, here is a good page: https://www.nps.gov/crla/learn/nature/research-equipment.htm

We learned about the Secchi disk, which is a black and white disk only 8 inches in diameter. They slowly lower it until you can no longer make it out and record that depth. The record is 143 feet! Slightly subjective, but it's been used since the 1860s.

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jamistoast t1_it3y9e3 wrote

Neat article! I’ve been out on the Neuston to collect the sediment trap and CTD for semi-annual reset (before 2013, obviously). My dad was an oceanographer at OSU and I think designed that sediment trap, then retired around 2013…

Anyway, I wasn’t paid (so the opportunity was unique to me because of nepotism, but tax dollars weren’t being spent on me), and got to sleep in the boat house on wizard island and scuba in the lake. Extremely cool experience, part of a small-but-not-that-small group of people to have done those things.

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hurl9e9y9 t1_it0db6c wrote

I want to go back (it's been about 7 years) and go to Wizard Island too. Cleetwood is pretty steep, but we were getting murdered by mosquitoes on the way back up. We couldn't take breaks because that's when they caught up and were incessantly ruthless. It wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for that.

We went down Cleetwood, came back up and had a late lunch, and then went up Watchman at dusk to see the stars. Came back down in pitch black (new moon) without a flashlight. And this was when a flashlight wasn't built into phones; you had to download an app to use the camera flash as one (which is what happens now of course too, but it wasn't built into the OS of the phone I had at the time). So I was trying to download an app with almost no service....younger and dumber, but very memorable at least.

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