Crater Lake & the Klamath Basin

About 7,700 years ago Mount Mazama blew itself apart, scattering ash across much of the Northwest, and its summit collapsed into a caldera that rain and snow filled over the centuries that followed. The people who saw it happen were the ancestors of the Klamath, whose accounts tell of a battle between Llao, chief of the world below, and Skell, chief of the world above. Crater Lake is 1,943 feet deep, the deepest lake in the country, filled by nothing but rain and snow and drained by nothing but evaporation and seepage. It became Oregon's only national park in 1902. The Rim Drive circles it, and snow closes most of it for much of the year.

Below the mountain the basin is lake, marsh and sagebrush. Under an 1864 treaty the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin band gave up most of it and kept a reservation of ponderosa pine forest whose timber made them one of the most self-sufficient tribes in the country. Congress terminated them in 1954, and the forest was sold, much of it to become the Winema National Forest. Federal recognition came back in 1986. The land did not. The Klamath Tribes govern from Chiloquin, and each spring they hold a ceremony on the Sprague River for the c'waam and koptu, the suckers that once ran up its tributaries by the million and have been listed as endangered since 1988.

At Fort Klamath, below the park's south entrance road, the army hanged four Modoc leaders in October 1873, Kintpuash among them, and sent their severed heads to the Army Medical Museum in Washington; the Smithsonian gave the remains back in 1984. Their four graves are still marked in the meadow beside a replica of the fort's guardhouse.

What to See in Crater Lake & the Klamath Basin

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Upper Klamath Lake

Klamath Falls

Oregon's largest lake, wide and shallow, where farms, endangered suckers and, since 2024, returning salmon all need the same water.

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Historic Sites

Fort Klamath

Fort Klamath

The army post that reached the Wood River Valley four years before Klamath Falls existed, and the treaty signed near it that put three peoples on one reservation.

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Watchman Lookout

Crater Lake

A 1932 fire lookout on an 8,013-foot rim peak, built to watch for smoke and to teach hikers at the same time, straight above Wizard Island.

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Architecture

Crater Lake Lodge

Crater Lake

A hotel on the caldera rim that opened in 1915 with tar paper on its walls, was never quite finished, came close to demolition, and is now mostly new behind its old face.

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Industry & Mining

Collier Memorial State Park and Logging Museum

Chiloquin

An outdoor museum of a century of logging machinery in the pine woods north of Klamath Falls, given to the state by a lumberman and his banker brother.

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Scenic Drives through Crater Lake & the Klamath Basin

Stories from Crater Lake & the Klamath Basin

Crater Lake & the Klamath Basin rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.