A perpetually upright hemlock log, bobbing in the waters of Crater Lake for at least 130 years.
Crater Lake (Giiwas) sits inside of a collapsed volcano, whose eruption 7,700 years ago made the 1,949 foot caldera that has since been filled by centuries of rain and snow. The water is unilaterally blue, stunningly clear, and perpetually cold– and in it, swims a celebrity.
The Old Man of the Lake is a weathered hemlock stump, 30 feet tall and 2 feet in diameter, which serenely drifts around the crystal waters of its home.
The first written account of the Old Man dates from 1896, when geologist Joseph S. Diller was drafting "The geology and petrography of Crater Lake National Park”. In it, he observes the great stump at the west end of the lake– and then returns later to find it had traveled a quarter mile on its own, snapping a photograph (black and white, above) to mark the occasion.
1938 would see an official study of the movement of the stump, which found it drifts extensively and surprisingly quickly, sometimes moving miles in one day. Its mythos was only strengthened in 1988, when it was temporarily tethered in place by scientists during a submarine expedition to the lake bottom. According to those present, a violent storm blew in from a clear sky, pausing the entire operation– which abated as soon as the tree was released from its ties. The stump also hosts a small colony of fontinalis moss, which otherwise grows only at 394 feet below the surface of the waters.
Just how The Old Man of the Lake has stayed floating all these years is a bit of a mystery (most stumps become waterlogged and sink within a matter of months), but the leading theory is that the tree was carried into the lake by a landslide, where rocks caught in its roots stabilized it into a vertical position. As these roots slowly decayed, the rocks were released into the lake at about the same rate as the under-surface trunk was waterlogged, forming a vertical equilibrium that is ballasted by the dry top section of the log. Because the lake is so cold and clear, the log is not rapidly decomposing, and has managed to float in place for over a century.
A very old man indeed.
