Watchman Peak Trail – Crater Lake

First off, I’m glad we visited Crater Lake in August. According to the literature, that’s the month where they get the least snowfall (which is still not NONE), and it’s been warm enough long enough that all roads and trails are open. Yeah!

Watchman Peak Trail is one of those that would have still been closed even as recently as a month ago due to snow. As you can see, we still encountered a good bit of snow patches on our hike, which was fun to play in, even though it was crusty-topped and icy. We’re from Virginia. That’s more snow than we usually see a year. Everyone take a moment to pose with a snowball. . . ok, we can move on.

The Watchman Peak Trail is a very popular trail (for good reason) on the West Rim of Crater Lake National Park. It’s only 1.6 miles total, out and back, and leads up 390′ elevation change to a historic fire watch station that gives a great view of the entire caldera, lake, Wizard Island, as well as the surrounding mountains. Most of the .8 mile ascent is on the side of the mountain away from the lake, so you don’t get great views of that shimmery blue water until you reach the top. But you do get to encounter the flora and fauna of Crater Lake. We stumbled – almost literally – onto a deer on our way up, then shortly after were entertained by a trio of cheeky chipmunks (or ground squirrels – I am honestly not sure of the difference).

The peak of the trail no only has great views, it was teeming with butterflies! This is also how I found out one of my daughters is actually quite afraid of butterflies. Okay. You learn something new every day.

There was a lot of snow just on the side of the trail. This trail just reopened last month!

I once got into a snowball fight in June on a backpacking trip through Switzerland. I thought that would never be topped. I built a snowman in Yellowstone in June 6 years ago, and now I’ve lobbed snowballs in August.

Ice Queen Elsa – let it go.

Can you see our “dear” (deer) friend, just to the right of Kourey?

There he is! Our Dea(e)r Friend hung out with us for a while as we climbed up the trail.

We didn’t want to sneak up on the deer, but he wasn’t to worried about us as we passed by.

We also came upon these cheeky little things. They barely cast us glances as they chowed down on some sort of seed.

I just love twisted, dead trees. I don’t know why.

Kourey took this picture of us at the watchtower. She was very proud of not breaking my camera. Again.

View of Wizard’s Island from the peak. It’s a mini-volcano in the bigger Crater Lake volcano. This side gave a great view of the fumerole bay.

The view of the mountains behind Crater Lake

The full caldera and lake

A view of the parking area/overlook where we started from the peak.

Coming back down the trail – there are a lot of switchbacks in the highest .5 mile of the trail!

12 Aug This entry was written by KateD and published on August 12, 2016 at 11:59 pm. It’s filed under Mission: North America and tagged Crater Lake, hike, NPS, Oregon, Watchman Peak. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.