Читать книгу Olympic Mountains Trail Guide - Robert Wood - Страница 34

Lake Crescent, the source of the Lyre River, lies 579 feet above sea level and forms a narrow arc at the northern edge of the Olympics. Almost 9 miles long and about a mile wide, the lake covers slightly more than 5000 acres, making it the third largest natural lake in western Washington. Originally called Lake Everett, in honor of John Everett, a Hudson’s Bay Company trapper who sought furs along its wooded shores, the lake was renamed because its form roughly resembles a crescent. The largest lake in the Olympic Mountains, it occupies a trough deepened during the last ice age by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which moved westward down the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Except at its two ends, the lake has a precipitous shoreline and is bordered by steep, forest-clad mountains. On clear winter days, the snowy slopes cast silvery reflections in the intensely blue waters.

The lake is suited to various activities, including swimming, boating, fishing, and water skiing. At one time anglers trolled its waters for the Beardslee trout, a variety of rainbow. This fish, named for Leslie A. Beardslee, its discoverer, was declared by ichthyologist David S. Jordan to be a new species. However, it no longer exists in a pure state because it has crossbred with hatchery-raised fish. The lake also contained the crescenti trout, a unique type of cutthroat. But it, too, has been hybridized.

Lake Crescent is paralleled on the south by Aurora Ridge, the divide between two rivers, the Lyre and the Sol Duc; on the north by a lower ridge that culminates in Pyramid Mountain. Near the lake’s eastern end, Mount Storm King rises 4000 feet above the water. Mountain goats clamber on its cliffs, and it was here in the 1920s that the animals were introduced in the Olympics. Since then they have spread throughout the mountains.

About a dozen creeks flow into the lake from the bordering ridges and keep the water level constant. Barnes Creek, the largest, has built a small delta at its mouth. The lake has its outlet in the Lyre River, which flows from the northernmost point to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, only 5 miles distant.

Geologists believe that the lake originally drained to the Elwha, via Indian Creek, but that a slide pinched off the eastern part (thus creating Lake Sutherland) and the drainage was then diverted to the north, via the Lyre River.

Among the first settlers on Lake Crescent were Sarah Barnes and Paul Barnes, mother and brother of Charles A. Barnes, who was second in command of the Press Expedition. They settled on the delta of Barnes Creek in the 1890s, and in later years other members of the family established homesteads at various points on the lake.