Wilderness Intern

With a name like Sky Lakes, this Wilderness is obliged to deliver at least more than one impressive sapphire pool, and it does. In fact, it takes in three major lake (former glacial) basins as it stretches along the crest of the volcanic Cascade Mountains from the border of Crater Lake National Park on the north to State Highway 140 in the south: Seven Lakes, Sky Lakes, and Blue Canyon basins. All of southern Oregon seems to lay at your feet when viewed from the rugged summit of the beautiful volcano Mount McLoughlin (elevation 9,495 feet), and then extends out northward into Sky Lakes' broad plateau-like ridges, dotted with many of the Wilderness's lakes. You'll find creeks and ice-cold springs (such as Ranger Springs, where the Middle Fork of the Rogue River springs to the surface almost "full-grown" from the beneath the lava), grassy meadows, and scores of crystalline sub-alpine lakes. Several of the Wilderness's lakes (Alta and Natasha among them) were found (by 1980s-90s Environmental Protection Agency baseline study of acid-rain conditions in Western U.S. mountain lakes) to have among the most chemically pure water known of all lakes on the globe.