We left our campground early this morning, with the trailer attached to the pickup since we were heading on down the road. That made parking tricky as this day's destination was another national park. Carter already liked this park because she noticed that "Crater" had all the same letters as "Carter"--they're just arranged differently. We started the morning with a quick hike that started at the visitor center on the south entrance of Crater Lake National Park.
This was the wildflower trail, and of course Denisa wanted to go on this hike. We were looking for the bright pink monkey flowers.
We didn't have to look far, because these bright flowers were everywhere!
Carter wasn't a big fan of this trail, as she got her shoes muddy and then wet. We also stopped in at the visitor center to watch the park movie and got her national park passport book stamped. That's two stamps in that new book!
We also picked up the Junior Ranger book, and found out that she needed to complete seven pages to get her badge for Crater Lake. When we told the ranger how tricky it was to find a parking spot for the trailer at 9:00 a.m., we assured him that it would be impossible to return for that badge. So Mark was deputized and given authority to monitor Carter's booklet progress. In the meantime, Denisa found an unusual cardinal flower that begged to be photographed.
The national park film taught us that Crater Lake was actually in a caldera formed when a 12,000-foot mountain collapsed after a major eruption. Some debris in the middle of the caldera formed Wizard Island that we could see from our first view point.
When first discovered, Crater Lake was named "Deep Blue Lake." It's still a good descriptive name.
We found a parking spot at the Watchman Overlook, and got our first good view of how deep and how blue Crater Lake was.
We knew that parking would be a problem when we saw cars parked along the side of the road when we were still a half-mile away from our next destination. We wanted to do the hike to Cleetwood Cove, but the parking lot was full, as well as every inch around it for a half mile. Mark managed to make a u-turn and found a spot to pull off the road close to a mile away from the trail head.
On our extended walk, we were entertained by swarms of lovely butterflies. They were everywhere! We did a little google research to find out these were Tortoiseshell butterflies. They have population booms every few years, and 2025 was one of those years.
Once we reached the trailhead, it was a steep walk down to the water. Mark was the pack mule, carrying everything we need for a hike and a swim.
The switchbacks continued for 1.1 miles as we got closer and closer to that royal blue water. During the walk down, you couldn't help but dread having to make that hike back up the hill. We developed a game of rating how tired people looked while they were hiking back up. We saw quite a few 10 out of 10 exhausted hikers, and we wondered if we would get that same rating on our walk back up.
Once at water level, we were faced with the rocky shore line. The large boulders made it very hard to move away from the most crowded area. But we managed to get further than most of the crowd to dip our toes in the water.
This is the only place on this big lake that visitors are allowed to get into the water. This water was remarkably pure and they work hard to keep it that way. Most lakes are formed on a river, and therefore get whatever mud or pollutants come down the river. But Crater Lake is in a giant bowl formed from the volcanic caldera, and is filled only with rain water or snow melt. We can tell you that the water was as cold as snow even on the last day of July.
It took great courage to swim in that cold water!
This chance to swim at Crater Lake won't be available to future visitors for a while. The Cleetwood Cove trail was closed last week because of trail damage from a large rain. They are closing the trail very soon, and it will be closed for 2026, 2027, and 2028 summers to completely redo the trail.
The last time we visited Crater Lake, we didn't know to wear swim suits. But back in 2021 that didn't stop Mark from jumping off the high cliff in his hiking pants. Carter wasn't interested in the high dive, so we stayed in our rocky section. There was a boat in the background because the boat tours had been postponed because of the gathering clouds. When we saw a flash of lightning, we hustled out of the water.
There was a mass exodus as it started to rain. It looked like we would be making that dreaded hike up the hill in the rain.
Then it started hailing. What!?! We picked up the pace of our walk. We stopped to find a dry spot when it rained the hardest. It was quite an adventure! But the good news was that the weather kept our minds off the steepness of the trail, and we were actually surprised when we suddenly found ourselves at the top.
Mark made the extra walk to the pickup, and picked up the girls at the trailhead. We found a nice wide pull-out and went inside the trailer to change out of our wet clothes and ate a picnic lunch. Even with the inconvenience of finding big parking spaces, it was nice to have our home along with us when we visited this deep blue lake.
It was chilly after that cold water swim and the hail storm. So we changed into our warmest clothes. Carter thought that none of her friends back home would be wearing jeans and a jacket in July today!
We drove the trailer to a Boondockers Welcome camp site about an hour north of Crater Lake to spend the night. Carter got the seven pages completed in her junior ranger book, and Deputy Mark awarded her the junior ranger badge. Carter wanted to take pictures, so we got a rare photo of the two of us inside our little trailer. It's smaller than our motor home, and we have learned that it was a little tight in the alley between the kitchen and the dinette. It's even tighter with a third passenger on board, but we've all had a good time. This was our last evening in the trailer for the three of us together, and we had several raucous games of Yahtzee to celebrate. It was a great adventure at Crater Lake and we'll always remember that "Crater and Carter have the same letters!"
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