Crater Lake is one of those places that looks better in real life than it does in photos. It’s like cameras can’t capture how blue the water is. When some gold prospectors stumbled upon the lake in 1853, one of them called it the bluest water he’d ever seen. It was definitely a bucket list item for me, but it took me a while to visit because it’s not on the way to anything. That turned out to be an advantage as the drive from the lake back to California was beautiful and unpopulated.
No one came up with the name Crater Lake until 1869 when a newspaper editor named Jim Sutton went with a group to explore the lake (and Wizard Island in the lake’s center). Sutton called it Crater Lake in the resulting newspaper article. The theory is that Crater Lake was formed 7,700 years ago when a volcano blew its top and its guts, which created space for a 1,949-foot-deep lake. That depth can shift slightly, but it’s still the deepest lake in the United States.