SCENIC highway built at 7000-foot elevation along the jagged crest of the world’s noblest crater.
Thirty-four miles of amazing beauty, three hours of vivid and changeful panorama. One vast colorful canvas involving a complete swing of the horizon; a heaping measure of high-flung Cascades, distant hazy valleys, friendly lakes, crystal streams leaping over waterfalls into placid shaded brooks, endless avenues of mossed evergreens, glens carpeted with gardens of wild flowers brilliant against the cool solemnity of the forest. And, to almost overflow the cup, a hundred views of the magic blue lake and its huge shattered frame.
But how describe the enchantment of the Drive? As well weigh the substance of the rainbow, or gauge the lilting spirit of a May dawn. For this Rim Road is not a joy ride, but a pilgrimage for the devotees of Nature. It is a spiritual experience-nothing less. For, holding up so clear-cut a story of volcanic catastrophe, it tells an enthralling chapter from the colossal Book of Creation.
No, one can not describe it. At best he can but-ghoulishly-dissect it. And pay a tribute to the engineering genius that, while overcoming technical difficulties, contrived to alternate boundless panoramas with exquisite closeups of the tremendous caldera containing its Olympian sapphire.
On such a mountain top the gods must have dwelt through all the ages before man crept up into the pageant; along such an eerier cloud-kissed highway they must have trooped in shadowy columns, their ecstatic voices carrying down the great forested slopes in sibilant whispers mistaken by men as wind among the treetops.
Yet we everydays folks strive to reduce such sheer magic to terms of gasoline mileage, gear ratios, grades. It can not be done. Approach the experience in leisurely and appreciative mood, and great will be your reward. For you will fix a gorgeous memory that neither time nor the fret of living shall efface.
G. THOMSON,
Supt. Crater Lake National Park.
