Summer Camping: Crater Lake

We have a few camping trips planned this summer and the first was to Crater Lake. It's the deepest lake in the US, it's right here in Oregon, and yet we'd never been there. We didn't camp in Crater Lake National Park, but just outside of it. It had a creek and canoes available to use, which was my favorite part. It was a high desert environment and smelled like sweet pine. It was nice, aside from the mosquitoes. We had fun doing scavenger hunts on the nature walk around the campground, looking for ants, birds, and tiny fish.
Crater Lake itself was awe inspiring but not great for the kids. It was a volcano that erupted 7700 years ago and has since filled with water. You can drive and walk around the rim of the crater, with a cliff dropping off to the lake below. It turns out taking a three year old there who doesn't want to hold hands and instead wants to run to the edge is really stressful. If only he could have read the giant DANGER signs posted. Despite that it was our best camping trip so far.
We had a lot of fun earning different buttons for doing jobs/tasks, such as washing dishes, signing songs, setting up camp, etc. There were even buttons for camp cocktails and making a fancy dinner. I earned both of those. The templates for the buttons came from the book Camp Sunset: A Modern Campers Guide to the Great Outdoors. The recipe section looks amazing and I am looking forward to cooking from it once Dean is finished with his elimination diet. There's a recipe for campfire baked cinnamon rolls!