Pics: Diamond Lake

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A few more mini-roadtrip photos from the archives, this time from Diamond Lake in the southern Oregon Cascades, not far from Crater Lake, the day's main destination. I mostly stopped here to pick up food and supplies at Diamond Lake Resort, but I can't exactly not take photos, can I?



The secondary goal with this visit was to peer into the lake a bit and search for the abominable tui chub. The lake's been invaded twice now by this nasty little fish. It's thought that both times it was introduced by someone dumping excess live bait into the lake, as apparently the tui chub is an excellent bait fish when it's not busy conquering the world. So both times the invasion was halted by partially draining the lake and then nuking all life in the remaining part with a few boatloads of Rotenone. Which works, apparently, although it's a bit drastic for some people.

So I peeked into the water briefly and saw no tui chub, or stinky toxic algae mats for that matter (a nasty side effect of tui chub invasions). So I'm going to officially declare Mission Accomplished in the War on Tui Chub, at least until some clueless fool reintroduces them again. Fortunately ODFW plans to keep monitoring Diamond Lake (assuming they have the money), so you don't have to rely solely on me squinting at the lake for 5 minutes once every decade or so and trying to remember what a tui chub looks like. Trust me, this is a good thing.



The snow-capped mountain across the lake is Mt. Bailey, one of the smaller and gentler Cascades. It would count as an enormous mountain in most states, but in Oregon few people have heard of it. More info from the USGS Cascade Volcano Observatory.



For what it's worth, there are no known diamond deposits in the area, and the lake is named after an early pioneer with the surname "Diamond". It's unknown whether he was an ancestor of Neil Diamond, although I'm not sure where I'd look to determine that.