A fun couple of days all in! (28-29th July 2011)
So for night time I decided to indulge in a guilty pleasure, and just drive off into the quiet forests of Oregon, and just, well, sleep! Well mostly sleep. I did leave a timelapse going of the milky way from the forests of Oregon…. Pretty!
The next morning I was up early, and spent it bumming around crater lake. When I first got the lake, it was mirror still! It’s rarely that still at crater lake (normally wind disturbs the surface, as it had does by the end of this timelapse), so I set up the camera… more pretty!
While that was going down, I got accosted by one of the GIANT VOLCANIC CHIPMUNKS that roam the area!
And boy did that 4.5mm sigma 180 degree fisheye lens earn its keep at crater lake. Y’see Crater Lake is just so big by the time you can see it, basically only a 180 degree lens will get it all in!
A keep back sign? Now that's just being a 'cliff tease'. Seriously though, these signs litter Crater Lake, which to be fair has a lot of cliffs, but does it really need all the idiot warning for people too stupid to spot poor footing and a terminal drop off?
and these ‘keep back signs’ litter the area in a way that smells of ‘frivolous lawsuit evasion’, or maybe it’s just to keep the number of Darwin Award winners from Crater Lake down.
Spent that evening on top of Mount Scott, well actually a rocky outcrop you have to climb up on near the top of Mnt Scott. But the views were amazing. Just sat there and watched the sun go down over the lake!
Thunderf00t on mnt Scott looking down on crater lake. And yes, its about a 50ft drop off that rock! Mnt Scott is the highest point in Crater Lake NP. The actual summit has a fire lookout built on it and smells of urine. However for those willing to do a little hand n foot scrambling, there are a couple of satellite summits that have amazing views.
Spent the early evening helping doing some astronomy outreach (of a sort). Skies were dark, but a little murky. Had the scope catching photons from the M101 supernova till about 2am before packing up. However Jupiter rising over the lake gave some captivating specular reflections! Left the timelpase running till about 4am, would have been longer, but I feel asleep before changing the battery. Damn my intolerance to sleep deprivation!
Next morning, a very tired Thunderf00t decided the air was still enough to take to the skies, using the helmet of doom! Here I was alternating between first person flying, and flying by direct sight. It’s really ballsy stuff in that by the plane has to be quite close (relativley) to fly by direct sight, and if you go further, you are 100% reliant on the video and RC gear working. There is also the problem that by the time the plane is so far away, that you cannot see it, the plane also cannot see you! So bascially you have to navigate by big cliffs and the sun to find your way home. The bottom line is, while the plane was almost beyond the point where you could see it to fly it, it still didn’t make it over the lake.
After that little adrenaline rush I was ready for some excitement, which came in the form of swimming in an ice-cold lake formed by a collapsed volcano!
and yeah that water looks perty and blue, its just as amazingly blue when you get your head under it! Regrettably, by the time I’d worked that out, I’d left the contraption for getting the camera underwater (a sort of ziplock bag) back in the car, 1000 ft above me on the crater rim 😦
Thunderf00t 