What happened seems to have been this. Some foundation underpinning gave way in the molten gulf below, and the vast mountain sank and disappeared within itself. Imagine the spectacle who can! Mount Mazama left a clean-cut rim surrounding the hole through which it slipped and vanished. But there was a surging back. The eruptive forces, rebounding, pushed the shapeless mass again up the vast chimney. They found it too heavy a load. Deep within the ash-choked vent burst three small craters, and that was all. Two of these probably were short-lived, the third lasted a little longer. And, centuries later, spring water seeped through, creating Crater Lake. Crater Lake is set in the summit of the Cascade Range, about sixty-five miles north of the California boundary. The road from the railway-station at Medford leads eighty miles eastward up the picturesque volcanic valley of the Rogue River. The country is magnificently forested. The mountains at this point are broad, gently rolling plateaus from which suddenly rise many volcanic cones, which, seen from elevated opens, are picturesque in the extreme. Each of these cones is the top of a volcano from whose summit has streamed the prehistoric floods of lava which have filled the intervening valleys, raising and levelling the country. [Illustration: CROSS-SECTION OF CRATER LAKE SHOWING PROBABLE OUTLINE OF MOUNT MAZAMA] Entering the park, a high, broad, forested elevation is quickly encountered which looks at a glance exactly what it is, the base which once supported a towering cone. At its summit, this swelling base is found to be the outside supporting wall of a roughly circular lake, about five miles in diameter, the inside wall of which is steeply inclined to the water's surface a thousand feet below. The strong contrast between the outer and inner walls tells a plainly read story. The outer walls, all around, slope gently upward at an angle of about fifteen degrees; naturally, if carried on, they would converge in a peaked summit higher than that of Shasta. The inner walls converge downward at a steep angle, suggesting a funnel of enormous depth. It was through this funnel that Mount Mazama, as men call the volcano that man never saw, once collapsed into the gulf from which it had emerged. Studying the scene from the Lodge on the rim where the automobile-stage has left you, the most vivid impressions of detail are those of the conformation of the inner rim, the cliffs which rise above it, and the small volcano which emerges from the blue waters of the lake.