Lake Crescent — the Blue Deep

That color out your window isn't a camera trick and it isn't the sky reflecting. That is the actual water. Lake Crescent runs so clear that on a calm day you can pick out a sunken log lying sixty feet down as if it were under glass, and so impossibly blue it almost doesn't look real. Here's the secret: the lake is starved of nitrogen, so almost nothing grows in it to cloud the water. No algae, no murk, just pure deep blue going down and down, the kind of blue you usually only see in a postcard that's been touched up. And it goes a long way down — more than six hundred feet, making this one of the deepest lakes in Washington. Ice-Age glaciers gouged the basin, and then, about eight thousand years ago, a great landslide came down and split this lake off from its neighbor, Lake Sutherland, sealing the two apart. The road you're on, Highway one-oh-one, hugs the south shore for miles, so you can drink all this in without ever leaving your seat. Look to the historic lodge on that shore. That's the nineteen-fifteen building, born as Singer's Tavern in its first life. On an autumn evening in nineteen thirty-seven, President Franklin Roosevelt sat by its fire, warming his hands while the lake went dark outside, and not long after that visit he all but signed this park into being. There's a whole history in those timbers. And brooding over the whole scene, that dark peak rising straight off the water, that's Mount Storm King. Cold, deep, and still, this lake is very good at keeping its secrets down where the light doesn't reach. For nearly three years it kept one terrible secret in particular, and that secret mattered more than anything to one woman who went into this water and didn't come out. Settle in here a moment. Ranger Boone has her tale.