Crater Lake was "discovered" at least three times, between 1852 and 1863. Bands of miners or soldiers, topping a mountain crest at roughly 7,000 feet elevation, were surprised by steep precipices at their feet leading down to a large lake (6 miles long, 4.5 miles wide) of incredible blue. Over and over, they report stopping, stunned, "gazing for awhile upon its wondrous and awful majesty."*
Of course, we are talking about discovery by Euro-Americans, pioneers lured west by gold or rich farmland. Native Americans knew about Crater Lake all along. Still, because Native Americans considered the lake to be sacred, they did not speak of it to the newcomers. The newcomers had no means to broadcast news of the "discovery." So, over and over again, early explorers simply stumbled upon the lake, to be stunned by its "awful grandeur."*
Whenever we encounter wonder, wherever we experience awe, it matters little whether we are the first to do so or the ten-thousandth. What matters is taking time to truly encounter wonder, to truly experience awe.
Theologian Douglas Christie writes of the importance, in this age of ecological risk, of sensing "the limitless beauty and vitality of the natural world itself and ... the expanded (or transcendent) awareness of the self that arises in relation to this mysterious reality." Put more simply, he calls us "to become aware of ourselves as alive in the living world."**
Writing about Crater Lake in 1904, Joaquin Miller put it this way: "The one thing that first strikes you after the color, the blue, blue, even to blackness, with its belt of green clinging to the bastions of the wall, is the silence, the Sunday morning silence, that broods at all times over all things. The huge and towering hemlocks sing their low monotone away up against the sky, but that is all you hear, not a bird, not a beast, wild or tame. It is not an intense silence, as if you were lost, but a sweet, sympathetic silence that makes itself respected, and all the people are as if at church."*
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*Quotes from early visitors are taken from Linda W. Green, Crater Lake: Historic Resource Study (National Park Service, 1984).
**Douglas E. Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford, 2012), p. 6,