Immediately behind the group in the photograph stand three trees close together. But today they are gone. The stump of one now projects over the rim of the funnel-like amphitheater immediately east of the Information Bureau. According to Judge Steel, the present U. S. Commissioner and affectionately called "The Father of Crater Lake", who gave the party on that day in 1907, there was at that time ten feet more of rim, as well as the now vanished three trees.

At the head of this amphitheater the rim area itself is depressed, so that melting snow from the rim drains off over the amphitheater-shaped rim slope. The concentration of this water into several streamlets affords those frequent landslides at this time which attract the attention of visitors and cause them to lean out over the parapet at the Sinnott Memorial. So works the relentless erosive forces of Nature gradually accomplishing the recession of the rim of Crater Lake. Undoubtedly it is this unevenness in the distribution of morainal material over the rim area that accounts for the formation of the amphitheater in the first place. In the course of the ages to come, probably such amphitheaters as this will father the development of steep, V-shaped valleys converging upon a shallower "Crater Lake"; and that lake of the future will occupy but the center of a much broader, shallower basin-valley than the rugged precipices of Crater Lake now enclose.