Discovery of a Hidden Crater Lake
Two hunters stumble upon a mysterious, glacier-fed lake deep in the Olympic Mountains.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Hoodsport, Nov. 3. J. Edward Farnum, of Philadelphia, and F. J. Church, who have been in the Olympics for a fortnight hunting, returned on November 1 and report having had very fine sport. On the ridge between the Skokomish and Duckabush rivers they discovered a lake larger than Lake Cushman and situated in a deep basin of the mountains at an altitude of something over 6,000 feet, as shown by the aneroid barometer. The basin is in all probability the crater of some extinct volcano, and the lake was christened Crater lake in consequence. It is about two miles in length and half a mile in breadth, with depth unknown, as the cliff descends perpendicularly into the crater on all sides, while a huge glacier runs into the southern end. A small stream forms the outlet, which is one of the tributaries of the Duckabush. The sportsmen brought back a couple of fine bear skins as trophies of the chase.
“The basin is in all probability the crater of some extinct volcano.”
While the geography of the Olympics is far better mapped today, the 'Crater Lake' discovery reflects the late 19th-century boom in exploration as city-dwellers sought to catalog and commodify the untamed wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.
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