Crater Lake National Park United States

Legendary

The 1,949-foot deep lake sits in the remains of the Mount Mazama volcano.

Photo by Road Travel America

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A tree stump has been floating upright in Crater Lake since at least 1896. Rangers call it the Old Man of the Lake, and it drifts around the water standing straight up, like a fence post that refuses to lie down.

Scientists once tracked it for three months and found it traveled more than 62 miles. Nobody is entirely sure why it stays vertical.

The lake it floats in used to be a mountain. A volcano called Mount Mazama stood here, roughly 12,000 feet tall, until it erupted about 7,700 years ago.

The blast was enormous, many times more powerful than the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980. So much material shot out that the mountain had nothing left to stand on.

The top of the volcano collapsed inward. It left behind a giant bowl in the ground, about five miles across and a mile deep.

Rain and snow slowly filled that bowl over hundreds of years. The result is Crater Lake, 1,949 feet deep at its lowest point, the deepest lake in the United States.

Here's the strange part. No rivers flow into the lake, and none flow out.

Every drop of water comes straight from rain and snowfall. Nothing washes in from streams, so the water stays incredibly clean, which is why it looks such an intense shade of blue.

The Klamath people have lived in this region for thousands of years. Their ancestors witnessed the eruption, and stories about the mountain's collapse have been passed down ever since.

Congress made the area a national park on May 22, 1902. It was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt.

Drive Rim Drive, a 33-mile loop road that circles the entire lake with viewpoints along the way. Take a boat tour out to Wizard Island, a small volcano that grew inside the lake after the collapse. Keep an eye out for the Old Man, and if you spot him, you've found the park's oldest resident.