The Lake

Hard Road to Travel. That's the real name of the picnic area coming up on your right in about a mile, five tables and a vault toilet. It might as well describe this shore. The eighteen ninety-one road along the lake didn't last. The water severely eroded it. That flat water hides a lot. The northern lake area holds the three largest hydrothermal explosion craters known on Earth, including Mary Bay, off this road, more than a mile and a half across and about thirteen thousand years old. Over the past century the caldera floor has tilted south, so trees stand in water along the southern shores while the north end has risen into a sandy beach at Fishing Bridge. The fish tell a stranger story. This lake drains to the Atlantic, yet its native cutthroat is a Pacific-side fish. Scientists believe the lake once drained to the Pacific, and that fish swam across the Divide at Two Ocean Pass. Jim Bridger's fish story, it turns out. Then came lake trout, first documented here in nineteen ninety-four, and traced by the patterns in their ear bones to nearby Lewis Lake. They live deeper than an osprey can reach. The lake averaged thirty-eight osprey nests in the late nineteen eighties and only three by the twenty tens. Over two decades, spawning cutthroat eaten by grizzlies each year fell from an estimated twenty thousand nine hundred to about three hundred. If you stop at one of the pullouts on this shore, shut off the engine and listen. Since at least the eighteen eighties, people have reported a buzzing sound moving across this lake. Chittenden wrote about strange overhead sounds in eighteen ninety-five. It's still heard, studies have been done, and no one has worked out what causes it.