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Herald and News
Klamath Falls, Oregon?
August 31, 2002
By LEE JUILLERAT
Frequent visits to Crater Lake National Park constantly reveal new tidbits of information that help to keep the lake and park a place full of wonder and fascination.
Consider Diller’s pin.
The nail-sized, barely visible pin was hammered into the caldera wall by J.S. Diller in the late 1800s while he stood in a canoe. For decades the pin, located in a cove below the Rim Village area, was used to measure lake levels. It wasn’t until September 1961 that the U.S. Geologic Survey installed a replacement, a gaging station at Cleetwood Cove.
In recent years it hasn’t been necessary to hike to the lake to figure lake levels. An Internet Web site keeps an undated reading. Historically, the maximum observed lake elevation was 6,179.34 feet above sea level on March 25, 1975, while the minimum was 6,163.2 feet on Sept. 10, 1942.
“It’s very stable,” says Mark Buktenica, a National Park Service biologist who has spent more than two decades studying the lake.
Crater Lake’s maximum known elevation is 6,180.5 feet, the average of several observations of lichens made between 1916 and 1960. The occurrence of living pine trees slightly higher suggests the lake has been higher for several centuries. As of Friday afternoon the level was 6,171.70 feet.
Thanks Ron for forwarding to me this interesting article. The absence of lichen at a slightly higher level than the reported maximum surface elevation indicates that the lake was once likely higher elevation than the maximum observed, but that this maximum occurred in the not too distant past; however, at a time prior to the reporting of measurements of the lake’s surface elevation.
Note that the observed maximum elevation for the lake’s surface of 6179.34 feet, reported for March 25, 1975, is the likely basis for the USGS benchmark for the surface of 1883 meters, as reported on the USGS topographical maps and in Bacon et al. (2002). This, the USGS benchmark for the lake’s surface elevation of 1883 m, is what the USGS uses to compute the lake’s maximum and average depth of Crater Lake of 594 ± 2m, and 350m ± 1 m, respectively, (equivalent to 1949 ± 6.6 feet, and 1148 ± 3.3 feet, respectively).
Interestingly, the NPS in its various reports indeed gives the lake’s average depth as 350 meters, but consistently refers to the reported maximum depth as 1943 feet (592 meters) in all it’s brochures and in most online sources. I would like to point out, as I’ve tried to do in the past, that it’s not quite correct for the lake’s average depth to be listed as 350 meters and yet have the estimate of the maximum depth reported as markedly less than 594 meters, even though the difference between these two estimates of maximum depth may not be statistically significant due to the errors of the USGS soundings of the summer of 2000.
Perhaps the need to update the NPS published estimates of the maximum depth of the lake to 594 meters isn’t being done by the NPS because of the cost of reprinting brochures, etc.?
Thanks again for sharing this article with me.
Owen
Owen Hoffman, Ph. D., former lake researcher at CRLA
106 Parma Rd.
Oak Ridge, TN 37830
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