Mountain Lakes Wilderness Area

Mountain Lakes Evening

Imagine that this classic tent is your home for an entire summer. For a story about three adolescents' wilderness sojourn at a mountain lake in Southern Oregon, click here.


Mountain Lakes Morning

Smell your morning coffee brewing as the Sun draws reflections in the still waters.

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Mountain Lakes Wilderness Commentary

Situated on the drier eastern fringe of the Southern Oregon Cascades, this small "pocket" wilderness was one of the Forest Service's original three "Primitive Areas" in Oregon and Washington. It was established in 1930. It became a "Wild Area" in 1940, and the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 brought it on board as one of Oregon's first modern designated Wilderness Areas. It covers exactly one township, and is the only square-shaped wilderness within the United States' National Wilderness Preservation system. At 23,071 acres, it is one of Oregon's smallest Wilderness areas.

It's amazing but true: Like Crater Lake and East Lake and Paulina Lake to the north, the mountain lakes basin is another snuffed-out volcano! Geologically, it is a collapse caldera, left over after the collapse of a mountain taller than Mt. Hood! In the case of Crater Lake, the collapse formed one huge lake; when Mt Newberry collapsed, it left East and Paulina lakes; and when the Mountain Lake's predecessor collapsed, it left a basin that filled with literally hundreds of ponds, pools, lakelets and a few larger Lakes.

This tiny area is just stuffed with wildflowers, great creeks and ponds and lakes, and a wonderfully variegated forest cover. One of the photographer's favorite trees can be found on drier, sunnier mid-elevation sites: the Oregon Sugar Pine, with its enormous, trophy-size cones and ponderosa-like bark. This photographer's favorite trail is the Varney Creek Trail.

 

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Page Last Revised 4/10/2006