Wizard Island in Crater Lake
— — a cinder cone the lake decided to keep.
Not only on a wall.
“A small volcano inside a larger one. Wizard Island rises from the bluest water in North America, the cone left behind when Mount Mazama collapsed roughly 7,700 years ago and the rain and snow took the rest of the millennium to fill. The summer boat from Cleetwood Cove is the only way down to the water, and the climb to the rim of the small crater on top takes about an hour. People who make it up sit at the edge and don't say much. from the studio
Wizard Island in Crater Lake, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Wizard Island sits in the western half of Crater Lake, a caldera lake in the southern Oregon Cascades about 60 miles north of Klamath Falls. The lake itself formed when Mount Mazama collapsed in a catastrophic eruption roughly 7,700 years ago, and the island is a younger cinder cone that grew from the caldera floor afterward. The lake surface sits at 6,178 feet; the island summit rises about 760 feet above the water. Crater Lake National Park, established in 1902, surrounds it, and the Klamath people, whose oral history records the eruption, consider the caldera sacred.
Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States at 1,949 feet, and one of the clearest large lakes in the world. It has no inlets and no outlets; the basin holds only snowmelt and rain, replaced slowly across about 250 years. The water reads as that particular saturated blue because there is almost nothing suspended in it, so red and yellow wavelengths are absorbed in the upper few metres and only the deep blue scatters back. From the rim drive the lake reads cobalt; from the boat the shallows around Wizard Island shade to a clear turquoise over volcanic rock.
The island is reached only by the park boat from Cleetwood Cove, which runs roughly July through mid-September depending on snow. The trail down to the dock drops about 700 feet over a mile, and the return climb is the actual cost of the visit. From the island, two short hikes branch off the landing: the summit loop to the small crater at the top, and the shoreline trail to Fumarole Bay. The rim road around the lake stays open longer in shoulder season, but Wizard Island itself is a summer place.