This ghost tree has been floating vertically in Crater Lake for more than 100 years
On its most active day, the Old Man of the Lake traveled four miles
About 7,700 years ago, Mount Mazama in southern Oregon erupted, expelling over 11 cubic miles of magma into the air and across the surrounding terrain. It left behind a vast depression in the earth’s surface, a caldera which eventually filled up to become what is now called Crater Lake.
It is possible that the Klamath tribe, whose folk traditions bear the memory of cataclysm, witnessed the massive eruption, but the event’s lasting legacy is markedly more placid. As testament to the erratic and often ambling pace of nature, this great disruptive force set the stage for what is now Crater Lake’s most curious feature: the Old Man of the Lake, a 30-foot log that has continuously bobbed—upright—in its waters for over a century.
In 1902, the Crater Lake area became the fifth addition to a burgeoning national park system. The lake itself—which is the deepest in the U.S., at 1,949 feet, is nestled between patchy swaths of conifer trees and coarse volcanic gravel. The water is renowned for its strikingly blue hue, a feature resulting from its cool subalpine climate, salinity, and isolation from other bodies of water.
A geologist and explorer named Joseph S. Diller was the first to document the improbably floating log in 1896. At first, Diller assumed it to be a dead tree still rooted to the bottom of the lake, perhaps evidence of a sudden rise in water. “The trunk was broken off just above the water level, and the roots at the base were seen through the clear water at the bottom as if the tree had grown where it was standing,” recorded Diller in a 1902 geology report.
He tried to shake the tree from his position in the boat, but the trunk didn’t budge. Not yet deterred from meddling, Diller tied the tree up and set foot on Wizard Island — a conical bit of land near the western edge of Crater Lake — to give it a good pull. “Sufficient baling wire was secured to reach the shore,” Diller wrote, “and it was discovered that the tree had no hold upon the bottom.” It was free to float around the lake as the elements pleased. In a visit to Crater Lake five years later, Diller noticed it about a quarter of a mile from where he saw it last.
This peculiar log — visible by its angled, bone-white top, protruding about four feet above the water, like a wandering dock piling — has since become an attraction in its own right. Tourists and park rangers soon developed a habit of playing and posing atop the splintered stump of the Old Man, which is about two feet wide and buoyant enough to support a person.
The Old Man again became the subject of official curiosity in the summer of 1938, when researcher John H. Doerr studied its movements — “Not infrequently it has been mistaken for a boat, and occasionally for a white pelican” — to chart the wind and water currents of Crater Lake. The naturalist collected some surprising data about the Old Man’s travel patterns over the course of 84 days. On some days, Doerr observed, the log didn’t move dramatically, more or less ping-ponging within a tight quarter of the lake. But on others, the Old Man proved capable of traversing impressive distances. On its most active day, the stump traveled just under four miles between sunrise and sunset.
The Old Man had been bobbing peacefully for at least half a century by 1988, when researchers tied it up to avoid striking its moss-covered trunk with their submarine. It is said that right after the trunk was restrained, the weather grew stormy, obligating scientists to delay the expedition. “It seemed as if the weather was poor so long as the Old Man remained bound,” wrote a (possibly superstitious) park expert. “Once the log was freed, however, the weather settled.”
This weather-altering event has become ingrained in the lore of the Old Man, but it’s hard to say if it needs the added flourish. Crater Lake may have pristine waters, but remains eerie in its own way, as its many visitors have registered. “Crater Lake is beautiful, but it’s actually kind of inhospitable,” writes one internet commenter. “That water is freezing … There are few access points to the lake since it’s surrounded by cliffs, and any sand/gravel — what little there is of it — is really sharp volcanic stuff.” The Old Man is a weird, perhaps globally unique feature in the midst of an already otherworldly location.
Nor should anyone expect a definitive explanation. Carbon dating has put the old hemlock stump at 450 years old, but the conditions of its origin remain a mystery. The hypothesis that the tree once slid down the steep bank — its heavy, rock-laden root system intact, later to rot away — is most often cited, but science will never have its smoking gun. Some parts of nature are simply not available to us in their complete narratives, better to be understood as signs of what happens when we are not, or cannot be, paying attention.
