Fremont-Winema: The Eastern Flank of Crater Lake

The Fremont-Winema National Forest covers nearly three million acres on the eastern flank of the southern Cascades, a country of ponderosa pine, juniper, high desert lakes, and volcanic plateau. Most visitors to Crater Lake come from the west and north. The eastern approach, through the Fremont-Winema, is quieter, longer, and substantially more interesting if you pay attention to what you are driving through.

The Klamath Marsh National Wildlife Refuge sits within the forest boundary, a shallow lake and wetland system that was once part of the ancestral territory of the Klamath Tribes. The Klamath people built their economy around the resources of these wetlands, harvesting wocus, a water-lily seed, as a staple food for thousands of years. The Upper Klamath Lake, adjacent to the forest on the west, is the largest natural lake in Oregon. The Klamath River, which flows out of the lake, was the site of a major dam removal project completed in twenty twenty-four, the largest dam removal in American history.

The Winema half of the merged forest was named for Toby Riddle, also called Winema, a Modoc woman who served as a translator during the Modoc War of eighteen seventy-two and eighteen seventy-three and who, according to some accounts, warned the peace commissioners before the Modoc leaders attacked them in April of eighteen seventy-three. Captain Jack and the Modoc fighters were eventually captured. Winema survived. The forest named for her covers land that was part of Modoc territory before the war.

The Fremont portion covers the southeastern extension into the high desert country of Lake County, a landscape of rimrock, fault-block mountains, and alkaline lakes that most Oregonians have never seen.