Crater Lake Wkend Part II: Hiking and Star Gazing

Mson New Pose - the thinking pose + the action pose COMBINED...at Crater Lake!After a nice and restful sleep inside the tent, woke up bright and early today to started off touring around Crater Lake.

A little bit about Crater Lake. A big volcano a long time ago, it collapsed onto itself at some point, make a big a55 hole that eventually got filled w/ water by the melting ice and rain etc. It is close to 600 meters deep or so, and is the deepest lake in the US (7th in the world). Pretty amazing eh?
So first place we went to was a hike that led us down to the lake, where we could actually touch the water. The blueness of the water was simply amazing! This blue had a certain richness to it... and every so often, on the fringes, you would see this emerald green color on the water as well. The two, with the moutains in the bakdrop, combines to provide a very stunning view.

After the hike down and back up, we then checked out a few viewpoints. The one I particularly liked was the pirate ship lookout point - where supposedly the island is suppose to look like a pirate ship. In my opinion, it didn't really look like a pirate ship at all. Rather, with the water being so blue, I found that this island actually looked more like a castle in the sky. Tried to take shots of the island from different perspectives... this one being one of them.

After lunch, we did another short hike up to a forest fire lookout, where we got a panoramic view of Crater Lake. Being up so high is definitely pretty cool! Also took some close up pictures of a little squirrel. I looove the loooong lens! :)

After all this walking, we headed back to home base and started to prepare for dinner. Had a little deep chat while we were watching the fire die down, and started eating. Burgers, hotdogs + beer during camping is just awesome!

After dinner, we headed out to a viewpoint to look at stars. It was just spectacular. The view reminded me of the stars when I was at the White Desert. I originally did not have my glasses on, but then at some point in the night, I decided to put on my glasses... and wow! There were soooo many stars in the sky. Makes me want to really get into learning about the stars and knowing which one is what. Oh, also saw at least 5 shooting stars tonight. They were really short lived ones though - not long enough to make a wish...

It was really chilly though - I think a few of the others actually put on garbage bags to keep warm... lol. The cool thing though is after an hour and a half, I finally got one picture that I thought was pretty nice :). This trip has also convinced me to buy a remote control for the camera... a 8 minute exposure is pretty long to hold onto the trigger for and not shake!

Two things happened right before star gazing.
1. I wonder what the format button does
As we were riding to the viewpoint, in my stroke of genius, I decided to play with my camera. Looking upon the 'format' button, my curious nature told me to click on it, and then KABOOM... all my pictures from this trip were gone! :(. Ah mondieu...

Hopefully they can be recovered...

2. Camera, Ground, Connect!
Random Adventure buddy sets up his tripod, then walks away from it for a second. The wind was blowing a bit harder than normal, and moments later, we hear something making contact with the ground, and a shattering sound! There goes the lens hood and possibly a lens! yikes...

And with that, the net cost of this trip goes up...