Crater Lake National Park - longest coast ever.

The next day of our trip we cut across California and Oregon and stopped at Crater Lake National Park. It's amazing.

A huge mountain just blew it's top about 7,500 years ago and when it settled, formed this gigantic crater. It's nearly impossible to get down to the lake, so it is pristine and unspoiled by humans. The water is the clearest in the world and it's just about the largest and deepest lake in the world. It has no incoming or outgoing water, but the level remains about the same year round from rain and snow melt. Check out my photos on my Flickr site.

On the way there and back the forests had astounding numbers of orange butterflies swarming the road. I tried to capture a movie of it, but they are so small and move so fast that the video doesn't really show how many there were. However, this picture of our car can attest to the amount... and the Prius is one of the most aerodynamic cars made to date. Other cars and semi trucks literally had orange colored grills and hoods. One little guy flew away when we stopped at this rest area - he had been trapped in the grill.

One more interesting thing about Crater Lake - from highway 5, it is pretty much a gradual uphill climb to the lake. Our mileage getting there was a sad, sad 41 mpg. We took the south entrance in and the north entrance out. Our mileage got back up to 53 on the way out, though! It was pretty much full on coasting all the way down - about 85 miles to get back to highway 5. Not the longest pure coast time, but definitely the longest assisted coast.

(I LOVE to see how far we can coast - it's like a little driving game. It started in NY when we were always going hiking in the Adirondacks. The longest was only 3 miles. Then I found a 5 mile coast in Shenandoah National Park. The longest pure coast time is 7 miles down in Arizona near my sister Maria. But Crater Lake takes the cake as the longest assisted coast ever. At about 85 miles, I don't think that can be beat.)