Crater Lake February Weather?

[Vaughn]

Wow! He went in a wagon in 1984! That's pretty hard core.

Whoops -- what's a hundred years, give or take?

[drew.saunders]

I'm actually interested in photographing a site near Crater Lake, but will need to go there in the summer when the ground is not under several feet of snow. Our son lives in Portland so we are always looking for an excuse to visit!

The one time I visited Crater Lake, it was snowing...on the Summer Solstice! I was staying at Diamond Lake, which is quite a bit lower in elevation so didn't get snow, and went back to Crater Lake the next day. Some of the rim road was still closed in late June.

[djdister]

Crater Lake in February? That would be an arctic adventure! This was how Crater Lake looked in late June, 1999. The plowed snow was piled up 4-5 feet high along some of the roads too.

[Drew Wiley]

Might as well still be the Nineteenth Century. You'll need to same mode of transportation. A car won't get you there in winter. Things might not get as cold as in
the Midwest, but the snow routinely gets way way deeper, and often stays that way clear into summer, depending.

[h2oman]

I don't know if anyone is still following this, but we've had a horrible winter in terms of lack of snow. I don't know the exact figure, but Crater Lake's snowpack is FAR below. (A complete bummer for those of us who recreate on skis!) If you have any interest in sort of knowing what is going on there, these webcams can be useful:

http://www.nps.gov/crla/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm

The first camera, which is up at the rim, is often covered with snow under normal conditions.

[djdister]

I don't know if anyone is still following this, but we've had a horrible winter in terms of lack of snow. I don't know the exact figure, but Crater Lake's snowpack is FAR below. (A complete bummer for those of us who recreate on skis!) If you have any interest in sort of knowing what is going on there, these webcams can be useful:

http://www.nps.gov/crla/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm

The first camera, which is up at the rim, is often covered with snow under normal conditions.

That is quite a lot less than expected, especially when compared with my shot from June 1999...

[Drew Wiley]

It's pretty hard to predict what will happen with snowfall during the Spring months. A worst case is when some naive person gets back on one of those roads or trails and gets trapped when a serious storm does unexpectedly hit. There have been some very sad endings to those scenarios in recent years, both in southern Oregon and here in Calif. And even if snow is sparse, it's still winter, and roads are going to be icy in places, if they're even open. But Crater Lake is somewhat
east of the crest of the Cascades, so gets less overall precipitation than the western slope. Contrary to picture-book stereotypes, two-thirds of Oregon is basically
desert, beautiful in its own right, but not visited nearly as much, except for Bend and the ski resort above it, which is more dry pine forest at the base of the hill.

[Leszek Vogt]

Just like Lassen, L. Tahoe, Flagstaff, etc. Crater Lake is at 6500-7000' elevation...and mountains tend to create their own weather. I've seen it around Mt Hood, Mt Rainier or Mt McKinley.... Sooo, if you look for a rhyme or reason for specific atmospherics - it's not exactly a stable environment.

As I recall, I used to go through Tahoe to Reno (several days/week). It didn't take much, overnight the snow dump created conditions where cars and trucks spinned out and CHP's (hway patrol) shut down Highway 50 completely...in order to clean up the mess. The road reopened about 18hrs later. It wasn't the first time or the last time. Just saying...

Les

[Drew Wiley]

Rainier and Hood are a lot closer to the Pacific. Crater Lk is more analogous to Lassen. Shasta is high enough to still maintain real glaciers inland. Most people don't realize that the deepest recorded snowfall on earth were for decades those of the central Sierra around the 9,000 ft range. Afterwards even deeper snows were recorded at higher elevations in the southern Sierra, then finally even those records were broken when instruments were placed deep in the southern tail
of the Alaska Range. Now it looks like another drought year here. But one of the strangest local weather events I've encountered was just this past Sept in Wyoming. I was timing my stay in the Cirque of the Towers for all the cloud activity overhead, and was very fortunate photographically. When this was just clearing out, we hiked over the crest on a still very icy backside, then into the chain of lakes on the north side until the edge of timberline. Meanwhile the sky had turned blue, but there was a very cold drain of wind past a chain of semi-frozen lakes coming down that little valley. Then, during the afternoon, still under
that blue sky, a bitter cold snowstorm arrived, looking like a ghost of snow-moving avalanche down that valley. It was so damn cold I had to curl up in the tent
in a sleeping bag. The wind was picking up moisture from the surface of the lakes and turning it into actual snow clouds maybe only fifty feet thick above the
ground! I've never seen anything else quite like it. ... not blowing snow, but actual snow precipitation under a fully blue sky.