This entry was posted on 10/12/2006 2:02 PM and is filed under West.
Crater Lake, Jupiter-sized cinnamon roll September 12
In the morning we took a brief hike on the Oregon Dunes and then packed the car. Our aim was to get to Crater Lake today in time to take it in and then drive to the Redwoods in northern Calif. Quite ambitious of us. Too ambitious of us we would discover later.
Driving back inland on more back roads, I got momentarily lost while trying to avoid I-5. A friendly, if not very strange, group of locals at a gas station got me turned around. How fortuitous! While retracing our steps I had to pull into an interesting coffee establishment I had seen on my misguided foray down the wrong road. Best baked goods of the trip. Real coffee, roasted on site and brewed to the proper strength and best of all, way off the beaten path. They called themselves the White Horse Coffee and Tea Company. Run by an Irish husband and wife team, they brewed fine coffee and made some of the best pastries I’ve ever tasted.
We bought a cinnamon bun and a ginger cake. The ginger cake was to satiate Alyssa’s cravings for the Williamsburg ginger cake she’d been missing for months. The cinnamon bun. Ah the cinnamon bun. Not a Cinnabon. No, no. Not a sugary volcano. And honestly, the term bun is so inappropriate. I would be more accurate if I referred to it as the cinnamon pie. Easily the size of Jupiter, we could barely finish it and lunch was definitely out of the question. Perfectly balanced sweetness and satisfying “mealishness” (which is why it substituted so nicely for lunch). We’ll tell you how to get there if you are ever driving down I-5 on the way to Crater Lake.
As hard as it was to tear ourselves away from this gourmet oasis in small town Oregon, we were soon back on track to Crater Lake. The turn I missed? I looked. It was not marked. Vindicated.
We drove through beautiful mountainous river valleys, dry and rugged and arrived at Crater Lake in mid-afternoon. In one of the consistent themes of our trip, a nearby forest was all ablaze. Visibility was less than ideal. Thus the crystal clear lake lacked that breathtaking forever view which we’d been looking forward to for weeks. But we were there and we were going to see the lake.
We hiked down the surrounding cliffs to found a couple of guys at the bottom leaping off ledges into the absolutely frigid water. We enjoyed the thrill vicariously. Here we had a taste of the majestic Lake as at this side of the lake farthest from the fire visibility was markedly improved.
We chatted up a trail crew building a stone retaining wall along the path. Young and weathered, they had grown up in a park ranger family. They told us about the park ranger life, living under “the man,” and summers working on the crew. They didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to get back to their work. We tore ourselves away despite their engaging and cynical chatter. We still had to drive half of the loop around the lake.
Along the second half of the loop we investigated whether or not the pirate ship-shaped island was really all that convincing. It was, though the pictures may not bear us out. We also learned of a solitary, intact tree that has been floating through the lake currents for decades. It has a name. I cannot recall it. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by such a historic and eery journeyman piece of driftwood.
You guessed it. We bit off more than we could chew. Sure, we could make it to Redwood NP today–by midnight. As we drove out of Crater Lake we began to renegotiate our night stopover. It would be in a Oregon hotel. We were tired and shuddered at the though of finding a campsite and setting up in the wee hours.
First, we drove for hours through majestic, old growth forest south of Crater Lake. The drive wound through a temple of trees, tall, straight and thick: Umpqua National Forest. The trees grew in formation. Not too close, but close enough that sunlight rarely struck the forest floor. Competing vegetation was scarce. One of the most beautiful forests of our trip.
