60 pieces · NaturePhoto by Hasmik Ghazaryan Olson on Unsplash (Unsplash License). Wizard Island seen from the rim of Crater Lake in southern Oregon — the forested cinder cone standing in deep blue water inside the Mount Mazama caldera, with wind-bent mountain hemlocks and a pale pumice slope in the foreground and the banded cliffs of the far rim rising behind.
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Wizard Island in Crater Lake
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Wizard Island in Crater Lake
This is Crater Lake in the southern Oregon Cascades, seen from the rim trail on the western side with Wizard Island sitting out in the middle distance. The whole bowl is what is left of a mountain. Mount Mazama was a tall stratovolcano until roughly 7,700 years ago, when an enormous eruption emptied the magma chamber beneath it and the summit dropped into the space it left behind. The caldera that collapse opened is the basin in this photograph, and the pale banded cliffs on the far side are the sliced-open insides of the old mountain. The Klamath people, whose homeland this is, have carried an account of that eruption in oral tradition ever since, and the lake remains a sacred place to them. Congress made it a national park in 1902 — it is still the only one in Oregon.
Wizard Island is younger than the hole it sits in. After the collapse, lava found its way back to the surface on the caldera floor and built a cinder cone that broke the waterline, and the dimple at its summit is a small crater of its own; the cone stands about 755 feet above the lake today, dark with lava rubble and stitched with hemlock and whitebark pine. The water around it is the other half of the story. No river feeds Crater Lake and none drains it — every drop arrives as snow or rain and leaves by evaporation and seepage, so there is almost no silt or sediment suspended in it. At 1,943 feet it is the deepest lake in the United States, and that combination of depth and clarity is what produces the colour in this frame: the water absorbs the long red wavelengths within the first few metres and keeps scattering blue back up from far below, which is why the surface reads as a saturated navy rather than a reflection of the sky.
As a jigsaw it has three distinct zones and they get harder as you go in. Start in the foreground, which is the richest part of the picture — the dead silver snag at the left edge, the ragged mountain hemlocks, the loose grey pumice slope along the bottom with its scattered rocks and tufts of grass. All of that is full of unique shapes and hard edges, so it assembles fast and gives you a frame to build inward from. Next take the rim: the cliffs run in horizontal bands of grey, tan and chalk-white with snow patches caught in the gullies, so sort those pieces by which band they belong to rather than by shape. Leave the lake until last. It is the biggest single region and the least forgiving, but it is not actually flat — there is a clear gradient from the pale, hazy blue near the far shore down to the deep navy in the bottom corner, plus the turquoise shallows ringing Wizard Island where the cone shelves into the water. Lay those pieces out light to dark and work the gradient as a strip at a time.
How to play
- Tap Play Wizard Island in Crater Lake puzzle to open the puzzle board, then choose your piece count and difficulty.
- Drag pieces from the tray onto the board and snap them into place until the full image is complete. Works with mouse on desktop and touch on mobile.
- Use the Preview button on the play screen to peek at the full reference image whenever you need a hint.
- When you finish, check your solve time on the completion screen and share it with friends to see who can beat your record.
Frequently asked questions
- How did Crater Lake form?
- By collapse rather than by impact — despite the name, no meteor was involved. Mount Mazama was a cluster of overlapping volcanic peaks in the Cascade Range until a climactic eruption about 7,700 years ago threw out so much pumice and ash that the magma chamber underneath could no longer support the mountain above it. The summit foundered into the void, leaving a caldera several miles across with steep walls and no outlet. Rain and snowmelt then filled it over the following centuries. The layered cliffs visible around the rim in this photograph are cross-sections of the lava flows that built the original mountain.
- What is Wizard Island?
- A volcanic cinder cone that grew on the floor of the caldera after the collapse, and the only large island in the lake. Eruptions on the new caldera floor piled up cinders and lava until the cone rose above the water line; it now stands roughly 755 feet above the surface with a small crater at its summit, and its lower slopes are covered in conifers rooted in loose volcanic rubble. Visitors can reach it in summer on a boat from Cleetwood Cove and hike to the top, where the summit crater is a shallow bowl you can walk down into.
- Why is the water such an intense blue?
- Depth and purity together. Crater Lake has no inflowing or outflowing rivers — it is fed entirely by precipitation falling directly into the caldera, so it carries very little sediment, and at 1,943 feet it is the deepest lake in the United States. Water absorbs red and orange wavelengths within the first several metres of depth while blue light keeps penetrating and scattering back toward the surface, so a lake that is both exceptionally clear and exceptionally deep returns almost nothing but blue. In a shallow or silty lake that blue is diluted by reflected sky and suspended particles; here there is little of either.
- When is Crater Lake like this, and when is it buried in snow?
- The view in this photograph is a summer and early-autumn one. The rim sits high in the Cascades and collects tens of feet of snow over the winter, so the loop road around the caldera, the north entrance and the trail down to the boat dock are closed for much of the year and typically open in stages through late spring and early summer. The south entrance and the rim village area stay open year-round, which means a winter visit is entirely possible — but you would be looking at a white rim and a lake ringed with snow rather than the bare pumice and green hemlocks here.