A small Crater Lake on the beach at Diamond Lake
The plan for the afternoon turned into a foot-deep crater dug into wet sand, with a rim packed up around it and a puddle of lake water sitting in the middle. The real one was down the road to the south, sunk deep inside a mountain. This one was on the beach at Diamond Lake, and you could step over it.
We came here for the day from Mazama, where we’ve been camped all week. We got here from the north, through Lava Beds after Lassen, when the rain came in and we decided to keep moving. After a morning on the rim, Big and Little both wanted water they could actually get into, and Diamond Lake gives you that. The water at the resort beach stays shallow a long way out, cool off the snowmelt but warm enough on the top inch to wade. Little went in to her knees and stayed there, turning over rocks. Big went deeper, then came back to dig.
The crater was a joint project. Big and another kid he’d met on the beach worked out the engineering between them, where the rim should go, how to keep the middle from caving, how much water it would hold before it soaked away. Little carried rocks over and set them around the edge in a pattern only she understood. Nobody asked them to make it look like Crater Lake. It just came out that way, a bowl with the water held inside it.
We ate dinner before the light went. It was still early when we packed up, but the sun was already long and yellow across the lake, the way it gets up here in late June, and the far shore had gone the deep blue it turns once the light starts to go.
Then we drove back to Mazama, the new friend’s family one way and us the other, south toward the real lake sitting in its mountain in the dark.