Crater Lake NP, Oregon (Revisited)

August 28, 2025

We don't often go to the same place twice, but the last time we were in Crater Lake National Park in the early part of the season when there were still feet of snow on the ground, we decided that it might be fun to see the park again sometime without snow. As it would happen this year, our travel route intersected nicely with Crater Lake.

We left the photography studio Soda Creek Campground in between rain showers. We were not in a rush to get to the next destination, so Rick had the luxury of waiting for a break in the weather before starting to hook up the truck to the camper. The weather cleared up as we got closer to Crater Lake.

A rainy morning

The skies started to clear as we were leaving the Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway

Mount Scott (Crater Lake is directly behind it--we think)

We had a pull-through site, but sometimes pull-throughs are built with a tight curve and have rocks and trees positioned in such a way that make driving into them a bit challenging for longer RVs (like this particular site and our particular RV). This is kind of ironic because the idea of a pull-through is that you don't have to back into it, and that should make your life easier. No matter-- after a little shimmying back and forth and successfully avoiding the rocks and trees, we eventually got situated into our site without damage to property or nature.

This site doesn't appear all that tight, but it was a little challenging to get into without hitting something

Despite being surrounded by tall trees, our site had a decent amount of sun for our solar panels

It was nice to be staying in the national park campground this time around so that we didn't have to drive so far every time we wanted to go to the crater rim. We were able to take our time checking out lesser attractions and spreading them out over several days.

On Tuesday, there was a lot of smoke in the air from the wildfires. Since visibility wasn't the greatest, we postponed the rim drive that circumnavigates the lake for another day. Instead, we walked a lot of the short trails just east of Rim Village.

The Sun Notch Trail

Pretty hazy today from the smoke

The rock outcropping in the lake is called "Phantom Ship". The park brochure states that it is as tall as a 16-story building.

A close-up of Phantom Ship

Vidae Falls

Wildflower season was over (it's a really short season), but we still found a few blooms

Vidae Falls had very pleasant sounding cascades, and we stayed a while enjoying the "music"

Castle Crest Trail

Castle Crest Trail is known for its wildflowers, but we were too late in the season for that

Godfrey Glen Trail

This large hollow tree stump looked like a pair of pants 😉

For anyone interested in some facts of Crater Lake, here ya go...

Wednesday's skies had become clearer by late morning, so we decided to do the Rim Drive after lunch. Unfortunately, a portion of the road was closed for repairs this season, so that meant you could not drive all the way around. You could drive about three quarters of the way...and then turn around and go back the way you came. That wasn't really a problem for us, as we are retired and had nothing better to be doing this day anyway.

A much clearer day! The scene was not quite as dramatic as the last time we were here, but it was still beautiful.

The snow gets as tall as this stick in the wintertime

Still some smoke in the distance

A few lingering wildflowers just for us

A different view of Phantom Ship

The lake wasn't the only star of this park

The island (actually a volcano within the volcano) is called Wizard Island

That evening, we came back for sunset...

We walked a short way along the Discovery Point Trail to this overlook to watch the changing colors of the sky

From our vantage point, we could also view the distant volcanoes shrouded in haze while the sun set

Walking back down the trail

The next morning brought clear blue cloudless skies, and we once again headed to the rim. This time, we decided to walk a longer portion of the Discovery Point Trail than we had done the previous evening. (By "longer" we mean about a mile or so round trip.)

The relatively short portion of the trail that we walked along had several good overlooks

Julie never tired of the intense blue of the water (as you can tell from the many pictures she took of basically the same thing 😉)

That afternoon, we walked the Annie Creek Loop just off of our campground. It went down into a steep canyon and followed a pleasant creek.

Walking down into Annie Creek Canyon

We enjoyed our repeat trip to Crater Lake, and we are grateful for the pleasant weather we experienced (mid to upper 70s and mostly sunny). Next up--somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Northern California!

Rick's Corner

Bulging Deck Floor

In a somewhat unusual move, Julie actually noticed something that was broken on the camper before I did. As she was walking on the deck one morning, she felt a bulge. Rather than shrugging it off as something that just happens sometimes, she decided to casually mention it to me.

After pulling back the rug, it appeared that something in the ramp was de-laminating. The good news was that we could not see any de-lamination on the outside fiberglass , so the damage appeared to be limited to the deck surface.

Pulling back the rug

You can kind of tell from the narrow shadow behind Julie's finger that there is a bulge in the floor

The thought of replacing the decking was not one we wanted to entertain, so all we could do now was to try to find and seal up whatever leak was letting water into the deck and hope things don't get worse. The two likely areas for a leak were 1) the rubber bumpers which protect the deck when used as a ramp to load vehicles into the trailer (which we obviously don't do), and 2) the slight lip around the deck which makes the deck turn into a bit of a pond whenever it rains.

The bumpers looked like they had turned into shriveled prunes over the years and no longer sealed the screw holes. Once they were removed, it was clear that the screws holding them on had corroded both outside and inside. The solution to this one was just leaving the bumpers off and filling the holes with some E6800 glue and calling it good.

These bumpers might have allowed water to get inside the deck floor with the deck folded up in travel position

The standing water issue had already been foreseen years ago, and the edges were originally caulked to try to stop this from happening. However, the caulk had cracked and separated in a location that suspiciously lined up with the bulge. Julie peeled off the old failed caulk, and then I cleaned up the surface and applied a new layer of E6800 glue to reduce the likelihood of water flowing inside the deck.

Sealing part of the floor where the previous sealant had failed

New Booster Tweaking

The cell service at this location was rather poor to non-existent. When I had installed the new cell phone booster at our previous location, I had kept the existing antenna in place (to save time) and just used the extension cable that came with the new booster to make the connectors match up. This unfortunately put an extra 25 feet of antenna cable between the booster and the outside antenna which seriously lowered the gain of the system. This campground required all the gain we could get, so with Julie inside the camper and me outside we fished the proper cable through to the outside and mounted the new antenna with all the proper cables. With this done, we now had just the slightest whiff of internet (compared with the zero internet we had before this exercise).

Another project was to keep the new cell phone booster cool. It turns out that this new booster (WeBoost Drive Reach) gets smoking hot (like you don't want to hold your hand on it hot). The manufacturer does admit that it can get to 120 degrees when running, but on forums people said that they had their boosters fry on them. I was not interested in waiting until the thing cooked itself, so I started looking for some sort of solution.

It turns out that I happened to have an old 12V computer fan stowed away in the truck (actually 3 of them) which I re-purposed to blow air onto the booster and keep it cool. I spent some quality time trying to make the fan more quiet and use less electricity by lowering the voltage to the fan. I used around 8 wrong-sized resistors in series to get the voltage down to around 6 volts so it would run slower. After it was all installed, I decided to use a bunch of old foam that I had squirreled away for a "rainy day" to encase and isolate the fan. In the end, I think it may be quiet enough to not drive me crazy, and the booster is now staying cool to the touch! If the noise ends up bothering me too much, I can always buy a new, lower wattage, quieter fan from Amazon and be done with it. Julie says she doesn't notice the fan noise at all.

I am happy to say that the new booster is quite a bit better than the old booster, and it allowed us to have a minimal amount of internet at this location (we are talking the occasional instant message and sometimes a weather forecast). The old booster would not have provided any connection at this location at all. Of course, any real internet use still required a walk to the nearby camp store which had free Wi-Fi 🙂.

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