Comments on: That such a place exists

By: frosgrok

frosgrok — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 20:50:32 +0000

I disagree about knowing is always better:

You look across a bay one night and see a lovely fairyland of lights. The wind at your back would, you just know, take a boat to this sweet Avalon.

Next day you drive around the bay, the smell is of an outhouse in hell, the view is of tar covered metal and blackened sweaty men. It is a crude oil refinery, circa 1970.

Perhaps we define “better” differently.

By: Vaish

Vaish — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 04:58:33 +0000

Knowing is always better indeed. Ignorance maybe blissful, but foolish.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:48:58 +0000

I grew up in Klamath Falls, about an hour south. A friend’s dad was a park ranger there, and he let a group of us spend a night in the rangers’ cabins in the middle of winter. We got up early and drove up to the rim (fortunately on a clear morning), and huddled on the deep snow with nobody else around and just watch the sunrise. Nothing in my life will ever compete with the stillness, beauty, and solitude of that experience.

By: Time lapse: Crater Lake | Matteo Rossini

Time lapse: Crater Lake | Matteo Rossini — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 16:38:11 +0000

[...] Crater Lake, Oregon, is an ancient volcano caldera that is filled with water. If you’ve never been there, words really cannot convey the magnificence of the view. I was there in 2006, and was so struck by the awesome beauty of the place that I did what I could to relay how I felt at the time. [...]

By: W. Bumgardner

W. Bumgardner — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 04:20:19 +0000

Crater Lake is so amazing, I feel privileged to have it in my state. As kids, we always speculated on what would happen if Mt. Hood or St. Helens erupted … and then St. Helens did!! Seeing the ash cloud roiling above the mountain on May 18, 1980, I can’t imagine one 40 times larger. It was 50 miles away and looked like the maws of hell itself. I don’t know that a nuclear blast would be as spectaular. We went hiking at Johnston Ridge last year, utterly devasted by the pyroclastic flow in 1980, and had trouble getting through the brush and wildflowers overgrowing the trail. Life has a way of restoring itself.

And a tragedy is playing out right now at Crater Lake, a young boy is missing and being searched for.

By: Jeff Hebert

Jeff Hebert — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 22:30:21 +0000

Phil,

I loved this post, it really struck a chord with me. I hope you don’t mind, but I linked to it on my blog (http://nerdcountry.blogspot.com/2006/10/dog-star.html). I write about life split between the tech world by day and country bubba-hood by night, and the night before I read this post I’d just seen the Milky Way stretching once again across our country Texas skies.

What I posted about, though, was the great picture of your wife, daughter, and dog in front of the lake. Specifically, how the dog seems captivated not so much by the spectacle of the lake as by the glory of the sandwich.

If it’s a problem having the photos on my blog just let me know, I’ll take them down. I did credit you for them and link back here, though.

Jeff the Blogging Novice

By: Melusine

Melusine — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 01:25:19 +0000

Wow, I’ve posted two posts today with links and html and they didn’t get hung up by the spam filter! Maybe the blog comments can stay here after all….

[runs away]

By: Melusine

Melusine — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 01:20:01 +0000

@Katie: You have access to the OED - I'm jealous! The USGS categorizes Crater Lake as filling a caldera. I was curious about the distinction, too:

A caldera is a large, usually circular depression at the summit of a volcano formed when magma is withdrawn or erupted from a shallow underground magma reservoir. The removal of large volumes of magma may result in loss of structural support for the overlying rock, thereby leading to collapse of the ground and formation of a large depression. Calderas are different from craters, which are smaller, circular depressions created primarily by explosive excavation of rock during eruptions.

Crater Lake is pictured here with other calderas. I think crater is used loosely for any depression, but it's good to know the difference in case I ever getting around to seeing one...maybe next year when I go to Hawaii.

By: Katie Berryhill

Katie Berryhill — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 22:38:31 +0000

Your writing made me want to go there…NOW! Hmmm…don’t have anything scheduled for the kids’ next spring break…

And FYI to Tristan: a caldera is a volcanic crater (crater is a more general term, but still accurate). In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary (what I like to call “the big book of words”) lists the depression at the top of a volcano as the first definition of “crater.” Keep in mind that volcanoes have been known far longer than meteorite/asteroid impacts. Interestingly, the OED also lists a caldera as the depression at the summit of an “extinct” volcano. I’d never heard that distinction before, which would (strictly speaking) mean that Yellowstone, Mount St. Helens, etc. do not have calderas. Hmmm…getting a bit too picky there, methinks.

By: icemith

icemith — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 19:18:27 +0000

I’m sure a young geology student who had never seen Mt. St Helens as it is now, and visited the area, would have little difficulty in estimating its pre-explosion height just by observing the slope of the remaining lower part of the mountain, and extrapolating up to the original peak.

It seems that the classic conical shape generally is consistent, being a manifestation of the outpouring of lava that solidifies and does not tumble any further as the slope is stable up to a critical angle.

If there is no significant side fissure upsetting that slope, it would be a perfect cone-shaped mountain. And I guess that that angle would be fairly consistent. Check other volcanos around the world.

Ivan.