Old Man of the Lake

The lake itself needs two sentences of record. It fills the caldera left when Mount Mazama collapsed about 7,700 years ago — the deepest lake in the United States at 1,943 feet, fed by snow and rain alone, and a national park since 1902. Into this blue dropped, at some unrecorded date, a tree.

Geologist Joseph S. Diller first noted the trunk in an 1896 report while mapping the lake for the U.S. Geological Survey — a "great stump" floating upright off the west shore of Wizard Island, spectacle curious enough to excite the imagination. He confirmed it moved by tying baling wire around it and towing it; five years later he found it a quarter-mile from where he had left it. William Gladstone Steel, the father of the park, described it in 1929 as a great tree "broken squarely off and floating upright."

The object itself is a mountain hemlock trunk roughly thirty feet long and two feet thick at the waterline, about four feet of bleached, splintered head above the surface — buoyant enough that rangers stood on it for decades as a tour-boat spectacle. Carbon dating puts the tree itself at more than 450 years old, meaning it was growing before the caldera's rim had a name. The best theory for its uprightness is duller than the legend and is filed anyway: a century in near-freezing water logged the submerged base dense enough to ballast the bole vertical.

Local belief holds that the Old Man controls the weather over the lake, and the legend has a laboratory result. In 1988, when researchers helicoptered in a submersible to map the lake bottom, they tied the Old Man off Wizard Island's eastern shore to remove the navigation hazard. The weather turned almost immediately to storm, then to snow — in August — until the scientists, per the retelling, quietly released the log under cover of night. The lake calmed. The sub went down.

The file also holds the lake's secondhand atmosphere: phantom campfires reported on uninhabited Wizard Island, eerie nights described by guests of Crater Lake Lodge. These are filed where they belong — under reported experience, same shelf as the weather.

The Old Man still works the lake unmonitored. Boat captains used to radio his position to each other as a hazard; private boating is banned now, and the stump continues its rounds seen from the rim as a white dot that is 30 feet of vertical log. The record gives him a name, an age, a mileage log and an 1896 first citation. The legend gives him jurisdiction over the sky. Crater Lake, holding the deepest water in the country, apparently approves of both.