Crater Lake: What Llao and Skell Left Behind

The Klamath people had the lake to themselves for six thousand years before John Wesley Hillman rode over a ridge in eighteen fifty-three and saw it for the first time from a Euro-American perspective. A companion, Isaac Skeeter, named it Deep Blue Lake based on his description. Subsequent visitors called it Mysterious Lake, Blue Lake, Lake Majesty. The name Crater Lake was settled on in eighteen sixty-nine, forty-nine years before the Klamath's formal relationship with the park became that of a visitor paying an entrance fee.

Crater Lake is one thousand nine hundred forty-three feet deep, the deepest in the United States. Its clarity is extraordinary: visibility underwater reaches one hundred thirty feet in places. The color, the blue that appears almost artificial in photographs, is real and is the result of the depth and purity of the water. There is no inlet stream. The lake is filled entirely by rain and snowmelt, which fall into the caldera and have nowhere else to go.

Wizard Island, the small cinder cone rising from the lake's western side, formed from a volcanic vent that continued erupting after the caldera collapse. The Klamath oral tradition identifies it as the tip of Llao's head, still visible above the water that defeated him.

When the park was established on May twenty-second, nineteen oh two, it became the fifth national park in the United States. The Klamath Tribes had been dealing with the federal government since the eighteen-fifties. Their reservation, established by an eighteen fifty-five treaty, was terminated by Congress in nineteen fifty-four, the same termination policy that ended the Grand Ronde's recognition. The Klamath Tribes were restored in nineteen eighty-six. Their relationship to the crater lake that their ancestors watched form has never required a federal certificate to be real.

Geologists and Klamath oral historians now speak of the same event in different registers. The mountain fell. Llao was driven underground. The caldera filled. The lake that remains is one of the clearest bodies of fresh water on earth, and it has been there long enough that an entire civilization grew up on its shores and named the forces that made it.