Wizard Island

The cinder cone rising from the western end of the lake — the tip of a small volcano that grew inside the caldera in the centuries after Mount Mazama collapsed. William Gladstone Steel named it in 1885, and a shallow crater at its summit, the "Witches Cauldron," runs about 500 feet across. The park's summer boat tours are the only way to set foot on it. It anchored nearly every view on my September visit — that dark cone sitting in impossible blue.