The Crown Jewel of Oregon – Over 7,000 Years in the Making

An Explosive Start

7,700 years ago, the 12,000-foot-tall Mt. Mazama endured the largest explosive eruption in the last 400,000 years of Cascades volcanic activity. This event, which was witnessed by the Klamath peoples, created a column of pumice and ash that reached 30 miles high, carried debris to the southern parts of Canada, and created a five-mile wide, one-mile-deep inward depression that would eventually become Crater Lake.  
 
Fed only by snowmelt and rainfall, Crater Lake, which filled over the course of a few hundred years, holds some of the cleanest water in the world.  The water’s clarity, met with its striking depth, creates the lake’s signature cobalt hue.