P ark Features Crater Lake is a summer place, and also a winter place. The two seasons are very different from one another. Summer is short. The lake, the deepest in the nation, glows with a translucent sheen, rimmed by rock with a few evergreen trees clinging to the slope. The soft green forests and flowery meadows are in sharp contrast to the rocky walls of the crater and the bare rock formations which poke above the rim.
Wildflowers blanket the park meadows and forest floor for most of the summer.
They are some of the 600 species of plants which have colonized the region since the volcano's ash covered the slopes for many miles around. The forest is primarily mountain hemlock and Shasta red fir, with stunted and twisted whitebark pine at the rim. Down from the rim, a more temperate forest of ponderosa pine and lodgepole pine is found. Winter provides a stark, white environment. A year's snowfall on the rim can be as much as 50 feet, and because of the moderate Oregon climate, the lake hardly ever freezes over, using stored heat from its lower depths.