Conor Knighton ran into quite a mystery at his latest stop on his tour of America’s National Parks. At Crater Lake National Park in Oregon, he discovered a special piece of wood that has stumped visitors and park staff alike.
Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the entire country. The pristine water in this collapsed volcano is so unbelievably blue it seems magical. It cast such a spell on visitors they named the cone in the center Wizard Island.
Physically, as Mr. Tree, I come to pay my respects to the old man of the lake. A 30‑foot long log has been plausibly bobbing in Crater Lake for about 120 years. Never the young man, always the old man. He’s always been the old man of the lake.
Mark, an aquatic ecologist for the park, monitors the movements of the old man. This seemingly unsinkable tree gets around. You would think the flow would act as a sail; sometimes he’ll move all the way across the lake. The old man can travel miles in a single day. Today he’s close to the shore; tomorrow he could be in the middle of the lake.
In the 1930s, government rangers observed the old man move over 60 miles in less than three months. In the 1950s, during submarine exploration of Crater Lake, they tied him up on the shore to avoid running into him. A storm blew in, the surface of the lake got rough, and scientists quietly released the old man; soon after, the weather cleared.
Why hasn’t the old man sunk? Rocks may have once weighed down the roots, water logging the bottom while the sun dried out the top. But some questions remain unanswered. As Mark suggests, maybe it’s part of the human condition to believe in a little bit of mystery and the interconnectedness of all things. As the old man bobs across the water, perhaps what he’s trying to teach us is that sometimes it’s fun to be awed by a mystery.
