While in Coos Bay, we took a small detour over to Oregon’s only National Park – Crater Lake. This is a pretty straight forward park on paper – huge crater, add some water. But after driving through the park and ending up at the crater rim visitor center, the view solidified this as one of the most impressive parks of the trip (which to be fair, is only a few weeks in…)

We did a short hike up to Garfield Peak where you can get a much better view of the entire lake, plus the smaller island with it’s own crater (not visited). The hike is short (1.8mile) but steep (>1000ft elevation gain) so when you get to Garfield’s Peak, you feel like you really earned the selfie.

The Manzana campground was a great place to stay for the night, if not in major part because it has a gas station and I did not plan as well as I thought our gas stops… At least the next morning we were not worried we’d be stranded in Crater Lake because Radu didn’t want to get gas 100 miles away from the park!

We met up with Ben & Hannah (whose wedding will be shortly after this trip!) and went down to the lake for a quick morning swim! The hike terminates at the boat dock where you can go on a tour around the lake (and even go to Wizard Island inside the lake), but the more important part was cooling down by jumping in the actual lake. Ben also saw the nice cliff close to the boat dock, so he convinced me to join him in a small cliff-jump. Happily, I can report we did not kill Ben before his big day – Hannah seemed pleased!