Climb to Crater Lake: The Mazamas and the Crater Lake Club to Join Hands

The San Francisco Call

May 05, 1896

The People of Ashland Preparing for a Two – Weeks’ Holiday.

 

The Mazamas is the Sierra Club of Oregon. The society consists of scientists and others of the Northwest interested in the mountain regions of Oregon and Washington from scientific, esthetic, athletic and other standpoints. It was organized in 1894 at the summit of Mount Hood when the top had been reached by 200 of the 300 people who began the ascent.C. B. Watson of Ashland, president of the Crater Lake Club, and Rev. E. M. Wilbur of Portland, secretary of the Mazamas, are in the City seeing about Southern Pacific rates for the annual mountain climb of the Mazamas in which the Crater Lake Club will join this year.

Last year Mount Adams was explored to the summit and this year a great expedition to Crater Lake is being organized. Crater Lake lies at the summit of the Cascade range in Southwestern Oregon, about twenty-five miles north of Mount Klamath. It fills an ancient crater six by seven miles in size, is 2000 feet deep and its surface quietly expands to spend a week at this lake and Joseph Le Conte, John Muir and other California mountaineers have been invited to join the interesting expedition.

C. B. Watson, president of the Crater Lake Club, will this evening deliver a lecture at Stanford, having for his subject “Crater Lake.” The lecture will be illustrated, stereoptican plates having been made in this City for the purpose. Mr. Watson is an enthusiast on his subject and declares that neither the Yosemite or any other park on earth has a thing of greater grandeur than Crater Lake.

Crater Lake Mountain lies some eighty-five miles from Ashland in the Cascade range. Crater Lake is held in the hollow of the crater, 6000 feet above the level of the sea. The highest point on the bank is 2200 feet higher. The lake is 2200 feet deep, so that the depth of the crater is 4400. The lake has no visible outlet nor inshore is 1000 feet. At one point a rock may be dropped 1000 feet in the water, where it will strike, and bounding, will fall 1200 feet more. There is an island in the lake on the northwestern side which rises 845 feet above the water. The island is itself an extinct volcanic cone. At a point half a mile east of the island the water is 2200 feet deep, making the island rise from the depths of the crater over 3000 feet.

Compared with other craters of extinct volcanoes its altitude, depth and area, it is the greatest known, says Mr. Watson. If Mount Hood were cut off at the height of this crater the cone above that point could be turned into Crater Lake and be lost. According to rules for measuring mountains, taking the incline of the side, etc., this mountain would, were it not burnt off, rise 20,000 feet high.

“There were evidently a number of great explosions in the crater at the time of its activity,” said Mr. Watson. “These released the water of a reservoir, which rushed in and quenched the fire. The rim of the lake is narrow. The view is incomparable; 20,000 square miles lie under the eye, extending over a third of Oregon and across the line of California with Shasta, Pitt, the Three Sisters and many other snow-capped mountains within the great circle.”