Crater Lake National Park is the only national park in Oregon. I think this is my third time visiting Crater Lake. It was a very spontaneous trip this time. P and I were visiting Bend and staying in McMenamins Old St. Francis School. It was our first time staying in a McMenamins hotel. They converted old school buildings into lovely hotel rooms. McMenamins is a pub but its coffee is suprinsingly decent. This hotel has a really nice soaking pool and we enjoyed staying here.

The next day, we drove from Bend towards Crater Lake. We planned to do car camping there but we did not have a reservation. Since this is a really spontaneous trip, we want to try and get a first-come-first-serve spot. If not, we would just go back to Bend. Luckily, on our way to Crater Lake, an available spot showed up on the website! So we quicky grab the spot and here we are, staying in a camp site at Mazama Village.

It is rare to see such a large number of butterfly around Crater Lake. The entire national park literally filled with orange-colored butterflies. Unfortunately this also created a lot of “road kills” on the car’s windshield. These small butterflies are moving quite fast, unlike the larger, slower ones seen in our backyard. The wind is strong and the butterflies are floating in the air, I feel like walking among falling leaves. Somehow the butterflies would not bump into you despite the strong wind.

Crate Lake is so huge, and this is a really good chance to use my wide angle lens with 11mm focal length. As you can see, the field of view is still not wide enough to capture the left and right rim of the crater.

Watchman Lookout Trail leads you to a vista point on the top of the crater rim and there is a small building for watchman.