Crater Lake Lodge

About this property

Crater Lake Lodge is a hotel built in 1915 to provide overnight accommodations for visitors to Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon, US. The lodge is located on the southwest rim of the Crater Lake caldera overlooking the lake 1,000 feet (300 m) below. The lodge is owned by the National Park Service, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. As of 2024, the hotel is a Historic Hotels of America program member, and has been so since 2012. Crater Lake lies inside a caldera created 7,700 years ago when the 12,000-foot (3,700 m)-high Mount Mazama collapsed following a large volcanic eruption. Over the following millennium, the caldera was filled with rain water forming today's lake. The Klamath Indians revered Crater Lake for its deep blue waters. In 1853, three gold miners found the lake. They named it Deep Blue Lake, but because the lake was so high in the Cascade Range the discovery was soon forgotten. In 1886, Captain Clarence Dutton led a United States Geological Survey party to Crater Lake. Dutton's team carried a half-ton survey boat, the Cleetwood, up the steep mountain slope and lowered it 2,000 feet (610 m) into the lake. From the Cleetwood, Dutton used piano wire to measure the depth of the lake at 168 different points. The survey team determined the lake was 1,996 feet (608 m) deep. This is surprisingly close to the modern sonar-based readings made in 1959 that established the lake's deepest point at 1,932 feet (589 m). William Gladstone Steel accompanied the Dutton party in 1886. He named many of the lake's landmarks including Wizard Island, Llao Rock, and Skell Head, and participated in lake surveys that provided scientific evidence of the lake's uniqueness. After he returned, Steel began advocating that Crater Lake be established as a national park. On 22 May 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a bill making Crater Lake the United States' sixth national park. The idea of building a guest lodge at Crater Lake was first raised by Steel shortly after the park was established. In 1909, Steel finally convinced a Portland developer, Alfred Parkhurst, to build a lodge on the rim above Crater Lake. The average winter snowfall at Crater Lake is 533 inches (13.5 m). As a result, the lodge structure was required to carry an extremely heavy snow load for up to eight months every year. Neither Parkhurst or the project's architects R. N. Hockenberry & Company had experience building structures in a demanding environment like the Crater Lake rim site. In addition, building materials had to be trucked to the site over very poor park roads, and the construction season was limited to only three summer months. These factors combined to slow construction and drive up project costs. To compensate, Parkhurst kept the structure very simple. For example, the exterior was covered in tar-paper and the interior walls were finished with a thin cardboard-like wallboard called "beaver board." The lodge had no private bathrooms and the only electricity came from a small generator.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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