CHAPTER IX

The Mountain That Fell Into Itself

It was still twilight when dinner was over, and the doctor said, “First class in geology will now be held on Victory Rock. Do you scouts have merit badges in geology, by the way?”

“No,” said Spider.

“That’s funny. Seems to me you ought to,” Mr. Stone declared. “Scouts are hiking around the country all the time, and it’s a mighty good chance to see how the earth was made.”

Victory Rock, the boys found, is a kind of bowsprit of lava thrust out from the rim, so that when you stand on it you can see almost all the circle of the lake, and the water appears to be directly under you.

“Now, take a good look,” Uncle Billy said, “and then try to imagine what this place was like before the big explosion. The rim here is 7,000 feet above sea level. In other words, we’ve climbed up, to get here, about half the height of the original mountain. We are about at snow line.”

“About!” Bennie laughed. “About is good!”

“Now just imagine the line of ascent we took from Government Camp carried right on up, all around the lake. When the slopes met, over the middle, in the peak of the original mountain, geologists reckon that peak was from 14,000 to 15,000 feet high. This was one of the highest mountains, if not the highest, in the United States proper. It was an active volcano, of course. If you’ll look over there to the northwest, you’ll see a big, steep precipice with a rounded top. That’s called Llao Rock. Do you see how the bottom of it curves up at either end? Well, that curve shows you where the bottom of a ravine was on the original mountain. In some eruption, ages ago, a great stream of lava flowed down that ravine, filled it up to overflowing, and hardened into rock. If you travel around the lake, you can pick out where each ravine was by the laval cliffs.”

“How high is that Llao Rock?” asked Spider.

“About 2,000 feet from the water.”

“Gee, then that lava stream was more’n a thousand feet deep!”

“It was,” said the doctor. “Much more.”

“And then what happened?” Bennie asked.

“Well, I wasn’t here at the time,” said Uncle Billy, “but as near as the scientists can figure it out, there must have been a tremendous eruption, scattering pumice all over Oregon and making a lot of our rich soil, and then, at the level where we are now, probably a lot of vent holes blew out, making the whole top of the mountain, which was only a shell around the great crater hole, so insecure that it just toppled inward of its own weight. About seven or eight thousand feet of the mountain just collapsed into the crater.”

“Say, I’d like to have been here with the old kodak!” Bennie cried. “And then what happened?”

“Well, then the bottom of the crater evidently started to spit again, and build up a new mountain. It built up a perfect cone, just the shape of the old mountain, almost to the level of the rim. That’s Wizard Island out there. Wizard Island is a later kind of lava and volcanic stuff than what you find in the rim walls. But the old mountain got tired about then, and decided to call it a day, and it’s been resting ever since.”

“But how did the water get here?” Dumplin’ asked.

“Out of the sky. There are no springs, so far as anybody knows, in the crater. That water has just come from the snow and rain—mostly snow, which has been falling into the hole for untold ages. Over on the east side of the lake, it is 2,000 feet deep.”

“Say, you could almost dive there without hitting your head on bottom, couldn’t you?” Bennie laughed. “What makes it so blue?”

“Nobody seems to know that. Some people think there must be some chemical or mineral gets into it. Anyway, there’s no other lake in the world which has its color.”

“I’ll bet there isn’t!” Spider declared. “My, it’s a beautiful thing. When are we going down to it? Are there boats on it? How do they get the boats down there?”

“One at a time!” Mr. Stone laughed. “We’ll go down as soon as the trail is opened. They get the boats down the trail on wheels, by man power, and keep ’em winters over on Wizard Island. You could see the boat-house if it wasn’t so dark.”

“Let’s go over to the hotel and find out if the trail is open yet!” the boys cried, and led the way without waiting for an answer.

No, the trail wasn’t open, the hotel manager told them. But the boatmen had been down and got some rowboats out, and two men had gone down fishing that afternoon.

“But it’s not a safe trip,” the manager added. “We don’t advise anybody to try it. The government is going to begin shoveling the snow out of the trail tomorrow morning. You’d better wait a day or two.”

They thanked him, bought some souvenir post-cards to send home, and went back to camp.

“Have we got to wait?” the boys demanded.

The two men only smiled.

“Better be up early,” they said. “We might have a try at it. Can’t tell. Bennie seems to want a bit of real wild stuff. Maybe we can give it to him.”

There was not wood enough in camp to make a camp fire, and no chance to get any more till daylight. Everybody had put on his sweater, and the air was getting colder and colder.

“Nothing for it but to go to bed,” Mr. Stone declared. “And be thankful you have those blankets you didn’t need at Rogue River.”

“It’s the climate!” said Bennie, as he shivered in his pyjamas and wriggled hastily in between all the blankets he could stuff into his sleeping bag. “Oh, you blankets!”

“And down in Medford, eighty miles away, they’re probably kicking off the sheets,” laughed Uncle Billy. “What do you think of Crater Lake now, eh?”

But Bennie only grunted. He was already half asleep.