Crater Lake National Park

Crater Lake owes its existence as a national park to a lunch wrapper. In May 1870 a Kansas schoolboy named William Gladstone Steel read about the lake in the newspaper his lunch was wrapped in, and he spent the next 17 years campaigning until Congress made it a park on May 22, 1902. Steel also noticed that the deepest lake in the United States, 1,943 feet, contained no fish at all, and decided to correct this: in late August 1888 he and two companions hauled 600 fingerling rainbow trout 41 miles from a ranch and planted the 37 that survived the trip. Trout were finally confirmed living in the lake in 1901, thirteen years later.

This map captures the dramatic geometry of the caldera: the tight, concentric contour lines of the inner walls plunging toward the lake surface, and the more gradual slopes radiating outward across the flanks of the old volcano. Wizard Island, a cinder cone that rose from the caldera floor after the collapse, appears as a small cluster of rings within the lake. The map is a record of catastrophic geology: the ghost of a mountain turned inside out.