Crater Lake

This photo was taken by my father-in-law, and I absolutely LOVE it!! 

Seth's father came to Portland for a visit this week, which gave us the perfect excuse to head out and explore a bit of Oregon. This last weekend's destination was Crater Lake Saturday and a last minute decision to hit the coast on Sunday.

Crater Lake was absolutely breath-taking and deserves days and days of exploring... the various hiking trails and a boat tour out to Wizard Island are definitely a must for future trips!! We stopped at a few lookouts and hiked the one trail down to the water's edge. I was a little nervous about this hike because it was labelled as "strenuous" and beings that it went down into the crater to the water in a mile, I imagined it might be a little too much for me. So the original plan was for me to sit at the top of the trail and read while the boys went down... but as we came to the head of the trail, I thought maybe I'd go down as far as I thought I could go and then I'd head back up or find a place to read along the trail... Seth took my bag for me (my bag of books!!) so that I wouldn't have to carry it, and we headed down. It was switchbacks all the way and didn't seem like it would be too extremely difficult for me to manage so I went all the way down (of course, feeling terrible that Seth was carrying my bag of books for no reason down the trail... He assured me there was nothing to worry about! What a sweet guy I married!)

Here are some photos from our visit to Crater Lake:

See Seth with my bag. He didn't complain a moment! Yet, I felt really bad that I had loaded it up intending to stay at the top... 

The water was a magnificent color blue and clear, clear, clear!

Contemplating jumping the cliff...

Seth ended up jumping a few times. It's crazy to think that the depth of the water under that cliff is about 200 feet (according to word of mouth).

When we first arrived, there was a bit of cloud cover hanging over the water. We thought they'd go away, but as it turns out it just got heavier. By the end of the day, we could hardly see across the lake because the clouds were so thick. Turns out, they weren't clouds, it was smoke for forest fires!