By Choice
(For July 4 vacation)


We drove 1000 mile round trip
Just to take a look at the beauty of
The deepest lake in America
- Crater Lake
By choice

Driving into darkness midnight
Sleeping in the trunk on road side
Waken up by the early sunshine
By choice

Continuing our 8 hour trip when daylight comes back
By noon we finally see the veil of the mystery lake
Located on the top of the 6000 feet mountain top
With depth of nearly 2000 feet
Round as a pearl
A blue pearl

It once was a fourteener mountain 2000 years ago
Nature chopped away the top by melting heat
Dig a 3-mile wide hole on the top
And formed the Crater Lake
To make it more attractive
She also formed a small mountain inside the lake
Again, a mountain without the top
Again, a round hole in the middle
Might be, there is also a lake in the middle
Might be, there is a smaller mountain inside the smaller lake
…
We can not tell

There is not stream run into the lake
There is not stream run out of the lake
There is not fish for over thousand years
Until some man or woman drop some a century ago

There is only one trail to get down from the steep rim to the lake over hundred feet below
It is closed
Because the El Nino
What?
All hiking trails are closed, to the lake and to the high point of the rim
Shit, El Nino

How will we spent 3 days of our vacation here without
Touching her
Or hiking to the mountain top on the rim to see her
To see whether there is a smaller lake inside the smaller mountain and so on

We did not hike
We Climb
At our own risk
By choice

The trial was covered by deep snow
Some area over twenty feet
We can not see the supposedly winding trail to the top
We climb by the shorter rout
With our feet and hands
On the steep slop for few hundred feet up
The eager of getting to the top pushing us
Igniting our through of
How we are going to get down

Hours later
There is not place taller than we stood
That's exactly how we felt
We are on the top of the world

Looking down the lake from the cliff
Uncovering her veil
Gives us a heart on
We melted into her beauty blue
Sitting on the top for hours staring at her
Enjoying her blue color changes while Sun light changes
Only two of us
None there
Of cause
The trial is closed
Thanx El Nino
We lose sense of time
Left alone the worry of
How we get down the snow steep mountain

There are two choices to get down
We found
Sit and slide down
For 10 seconds
Or pick a zip-zap rout to stumble down
To the same point
For 10 minute

We took the easy way out
By choise
But sometime
We know
10 second might be seem a lot longer than 10 minute

-To be continue
5am July 8, 1998

P.s. fourteener - mountain over 1,400 hundred feet elevation