In retrospect, it was probably not the brightest suggestion I’ve ever made and something I’d expect the scientists involved to have studied already. Hmm … maybe I can blame that on drinking too many gallons of something myself!

Evapouration only if it’s in Imperial Gallons

The precipitation is almost all from mid autumn to mid spring yet the lake stays constant year ’round. They’ve modeled the input and output of every known source/sink of water and come up really short of what must be leaving the lake. I peppered the ranger who was leading our group with the same questions (which is how I learned about the tritium). It obviously has to be going into an aquifer, but no one can find it yet.

It could be leaving through very deep fissures that are part of the old vent directly under the lake, and not showing up in the general water supply until it was far enough away to be diluted past the detection level for the tritium (that’s my first guess, homeopathic lake water!). My second guess is that it’s still down there and is filling in all the cracks in the crust. It sometimes takes a really long time for water to re-emerge. The “weeping rocks” in Zion Natl. Park have a “residence time” of three to four thousand years, and that’s just coming through a couple hundred feet of sandstone.

- Jack

I think the tent and the movement made the video as powerful as it was. It gives the viewer the experience rather than just the view. I prefer this to many of the other time lapse videos.

@Messier Tid Upper – until I read your comment I just assumed that it was. oops!

BTW. Am I the only one to think the music here has a very Simon & Garfunkel vibe to it?

Thank you, Wade. Methinks our host has slipped a bit.

Also, in addition to being the deepest lake in the US, it is also the clearest. The black-and-white circular target that they use to measure turbidity (particles in the water) had to be made over 2X larger in diameter because the normal one (~10″ in diameter) would drop below the level of visual acuity before disappearing!

Finally, there’s a huge mystery as to where the water in the lake goes. It’s fed completely by precipitation (it’s the highest peak in the area so there’s nothing higher to flow down from). Some of it’s direct and some is later snow melt from the walls, but no matter what time of year, the water level never varies more than a foot or so. They know that there’s a “drain” at the eastern end of the lake, but no one has been able to definitively explain where it goes. The water is tagged with tritium coming from the volcanic gasses leaching up from the vent at the bottom, so it would be easy to identify. They’ve sunk wells all around the base of the mountain and none of the lake water shows up. A great mystery!

- Jack

Never having been to Minnesota Ican’t say whether you’ve suceeded in capturing the essence of it or not but that description above sounded pretty awesome to me. A very good descriptive attempt at least.

*****
So mellow. Beautiful.

Superluminous (beyond merely brilliant) view of the stars reflected in the Crater lake waters. Love this. Thanks.

Drive deep into the wilderness (The BWCA is my wilderness of choice). No trace of electric light can be seen anywhere. Motor vehicles (snowmobiles, ATVs, etc.) are forbidden inside the park.
Snowshoe in for hours. Set up your tent with sleeping pad(s), sleeping bag(s) and lay out your layers of insulation to put on as the night gets colder and colder.
If you have the right equipment and clothing, you can be comfortable no matter how cold and windy it gets.

There are no signs of humans, not even the scent of distant camp fires. The bears are hibernating so you don’t have to hang your food from a tall branch.

The best reward comes during the wee hours when the sky is clearer than it can be almost anywhere else because there are no lights for many miles and there’s very little water vapor in the bitterly cold air.
The Milky Way looks like Odin had flung a river of milk from Audhumla across the entire sky. The stars are so sharp that they hurt. The dimmest of satellites leap out from the other specks of light because they’re moving.

I have been gifted with northern lights only a few times and they were weak each time. However, I have been serenaded to sleep more than once by the eerie and beautiful singing of distant packs of wolves.