Broken Top - No Name Lake

Author's Comments

I will not tell you exactly where the trail forks, because some places earn their quiet by being slightly inconvenient to find. What I will say is this: at seven thousand feet, in a cirque carved into the eastern wall of a volcano that has been falling apart for thousands of years, there is a lake the color of nothing else in Oregon. Turquoise is not quite the word. It is the color of glacial silt suspended in water that should not exist, held in a bowl of red and orange and yellow rock that looks more like the inside of a kiln than anything alpine. I went in late August, which is roughly when the snow has finally cleared from the access road and the lake is at its most saturated. Morning is the time. The amphitheater walls catch the first light directly, and for maybe an hour the rock glows in a way that makes the lake go almost unreal beneath it. By noon the light has flattened and the magic is gone until the next morning. The crowds are minimal because the road keeps them that way. You need clearance, you need a permit, you need to want it. That filter is doing work, and I am grateful for it. A few notes on photographing it. The wide shot is obvious and worth making. But I found myself more interested in the details - the way the colored scree meets the waterline, the small ice shelves that linger into August, the texture of the cirque wall reflected in still water. Bring a polarizer. Bring time. Leave before the wind picks up, which it will, around ten.

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