Crater Lake National Park Tours

Annie Creek Gift Shop Parking Lot
Your starting point at the south entrance near Mazama Village, with restrooms and easy access to Rim Drive. This is also where Greg explains how the location-aware tour works before you pull out and head north toward the Entrance Station.

Steel Visitor Center
Named after William Gladstone Steel, the man who spent seventeen years lobbying Congress to protect this lake after reading about it as a teenager in Kansas. This is both the informational hub of the park and the final stop on the tour, where you'll hear the full story of how he pulled it off.

Godfrey Glen Trail
An easy one-mile loop through old-growth forest ending at a canyon overlook lined with volcanic pinnacles rising from the creek bed. A Dig Deeper segment covers trail safety, wildlife encounters, and why this "gentle" trail has a surprising history of visitor mishaps.

Watchman Peak Trailhead
A two-mile round-trip hike to a 1932 fire lookout tower with unobstructed views of the entire lake and Wizard Island. On clear days you can even spot Mount Shasta, tying back to the Klamath legend of Llao and Skell.

Hillman Peak
At 8,151 feet, the highest point on the entire caldera rim, named for a 21-year-old gold prospector whose mule stopped him one step short of riding over the edge in 1853 — making him the first non-Native person to see the lake.

Merriam Point
One of the finest overlooks on the drive, where you learn the simple physics behind Crater Lake's impossibly blue color: no rivers or streams bring in sediment, so sunlight penetrates hundreds of feet and only blue scatters back.

Wizard Island
A volcanic cinder cone that grew from the caldera floor after Mount Mazama's collapse, eventually rising above the waterline. Its summit holds a small crater called the Witch's Cauldron, though the trail and boat access are closed for renovations until 2029.

Pumice Castle
A striking shelf of orange and gold pumice deposits jutting from the caldera wall, roughly 150 feet tall, with each colored layer marking a separate ancient eruption.

Phantom Ship Overlook
Jagged rock spires roughly 400,000 years old — older than the volcano itself — that survived Mount Mazama's collapse because they were already harder than everything around them. A Dig Deeper explains how the formation earned its ghostly name.

Sun Notch Trailhead
A short, steep half-mile hike to a gap in the rim with a direct view down to the Phantom Ship and across to the far side of the lake — a view most visitors who skip it regret missing.

Vidae Falls
The park's most visited waterfall, dropping 100 feet over a basalt cliff, fed entirely by snowmelt and underground springs since the lake itself has no outlets.