Crater Lake

The blue hits you before anything else registers. It is not the blue of other lakes: not turquoise, not teal, not sky-reflected. It is a saturated, impossible indigo that deepens the longer you stare, as though the water is generating its own light from below. The rim drops away at your feet, and 1,900 feet down, that blue just keeps going.

Crater Lake fills the shell of Mount Mazama, a volcano that stood 12,000 feet tall until its summit imploded in a catastrophic eruption 7,700 years ago. At 1,943 feet it is the deepest lake in America and the world's deepest volcanic lake, fed by nothing but rain and snow. No river enters and none leaves, and the water is so deep and so stable it has not frozen over since 1949. Rim Drive circles the whole caldera, pull-out after pull-out delivering that impossible blue from new angles, though deep snowpack closes it for much of the year and the reliable window is high summer. Wizard Island rises from the western bay with a crater of its own at the summit, a volcano inside a volcano, and the 1915 stone-and-timber lodge on the rim serves dinner with the caldera stretching below.