The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Lake on Top Of a Volcano Last week I wrote that California's Yosemite Valley is unlike any other place on earth. I may sound fickle this week when I proclaim...
...The gazing beholder cannot swim in this water, cannot even touch it...
...The second is to provide enjoyment and recreation for millions of people who have paid for these areas and who own them...
...It gives the onlooker a sense of infinite elevation, perhaps because this vision is beyond reach...
...I may sound fickle this week when I proclaim that Oregon's Crater Lake is surpassingly beautiful and completely unique...
...The cheerful tone of the occasion is set by short and amusing programs given by young college people, who do a good deal of the work about the camp...
...Its real distinction is its breathtaking beauty...
...Thomas J. Williams, the superintendent of this exceptionally interesting park...
...The first purpose of the Park Service, Superintendent Williams explained, is to preserve the beauties of these regions which have been set aside by Congress...
...There may be some body of water like it in some far place of Asia or Africa, but if there is I have never heard of it...
...Then, every evening in the lobby of the lodge there is an informal talk on some feature of the region...
...These three purposes...
...I really feel ashamed to take my pay...
...The average visitor says almost automatically that the inexpressible color is produced by reflection of the sky...
...What especially fascinates me is his account of the great, jagged rim which hems in the sheet of water...
...The third is to increase their intelligence painlessly while they are having fun...
...Instead, there are talks in the Sinnott Memorial, a fine stone structure halfway down the great rim...
...We have the opportunity to live in an ideal environment and to preserve and improve it...
...My interest right now is centered in another man named Williams...
...This place allows the speaker to point out the rocky features of his environment as he goes along...
...On this mountaintop, the evening air is too cool for the campfire talks which are a leading feature of activity in other national parks...
...Wild flowers cover the meadows and play an especially prominent part in the community life...
...All viewers of this waterscape agree that they have never seen anything distantly resembling it...
...The real fact is said to be that the rays of the sun are separated by refraction from the unusually pure water much as they would be by a prismatic glass...
...You can't get anywhere by playing the policeman...
...What actually happened is so complex and interesting that Howell Williams, professor of geology at the University of California, has published a detailed book on it...
...In the National Park Service, he has had a chance to help preserve and expand the features of the country he loves...
...Williams drawled as we sat before the great log fire in the camp lodge, "are not separate...
...The water immediately below me has a color which is so intense that it seems to be impregnated with some deep, deep dye...
...Its main distinction is not even the fact that it lies in the crater of an extinct volcano and is completely surrounded by lava cliffs rising from 500 to 2,000 feet above the water level...
...Put over the idea that the parks belong to the people and they will help to defend them...
...As I sit in my room in the lodge of Crater Lake National Park, I look down upon a surface of heavenly blue which all of the ladies in solid phalanx assembled have tried in vain to describe...
...We are trying to make people better by giving them a feeling for a mountain or a range of mountains...
...There is about the whole project a feeling of hearty enjoyment as of people come together for a good time in their own home...
...Basing their calculations on the positions of these masses and on the glacial scratches on their surfaces, the scientists can determine the height and shape of the original peak...
...And the blue shade, being singled out and sent up from the surface of the lake, gives the effect of a deep blue body of water...
...The job has a romantic side," he said to me...
...In a sense and to a certain extent, this is true...
...The untechnical, rough-and-ready way of explaining how a fine lake could come into existence on the top of a mountain is to say that the mountain blew its top and then the rain and the snow filled the resulting cavity with water...
...Through education and appreciation you secure wise usage which results in preservation...
...He came from a dirty little mining town in the East and found the West big and clean and hospitable...
...The most exceptional thing about this lake is not that— six miles wide and 2,000 feet deep— it lies on the top of a mountain completely cut off from outside water except for rain and snow...
...Crater Lake impressed me as being an especially lovely place to spend a vacation...
...The rocks which compose it are of different sorts and have come to rest at various angles...
...They have called it delphinium blue, Maxfield Parrish blue, purple blue, Mediterranean blue— and finally have acknowledged their defeat by describing it as Crater Lake blue...
...Farther off, toward the opposite shore, it turns to a lighter, gayer, more skylike hue...
Vol. 40 • August 1957 • No. 34
