Lake Waldo, Oregon, USA

Loanwolf · 20th August 2008, 02:56

Good day all. I just thought I would drop this thread and show some of the picks we took at Lake Waldo in Oregon State.

Lake Waldo is said to be the third clearest lake in the world. Baikal is first, Crater Lake is second (just south of Waldo) and Waldo is said to be third. The visibility is down a little I was told by Walt Bolton at Central Oregon Diving. This is due to the fire retardant used on the fire that burned the mountain just north of the lake. The lake sits at just over 5400 feet in elevation and is 480' deep. The day that we were there it was over 200' of vis and amazing.

I had been on a two month long road trip that took me form BC to Mexico diving the coast and lakes the whole way. I was sitting in Bend, Oregon after trying to see if I could sound a cave I found that the local USGS office did not even know was there. But the rivers are running way to high due to the amount of snow fall this year. So as I sat in the trailer thinking of what to dive next and who I could call in the area. I gave a call to a friend and OC diver form Portland a few hours away Craig Baumann. He was game and we discussed a few different high lake options. There are a lot of great lakes in central Oregon of which many are volcanic craters and very deep and clear. We settled on Waldo and the next day I headed for the lake. Craig did not get their until later in the afternoon so we scouted out the area fighting Mosquitoes form hell. Due to the late snow the Mosquitoes were just hell and hungry, good thing I had a portable dive shop so we could get inside and away from them.

The next morning we got up and prepared our gear early in the morning when it was cold. No Mosquitoes , until it warmed up a little then it was hell again. We got into the water to get away from the little @#$%XX and started the dive. The surface water was already 60F until 6' then it dropped to 42F and stayed there for the most part until you got to 120' then it dropped to 36F.

The bottom of the lake is covered in a moss that is very fragile and you do not want to touch down on it because who knows how long it will take to grow back in. We headed out to the south west of where we put in and hit a rock ridge that runs down to about 120' at it deepest. This is a dive that you really want to do with scooters for it is your typical lake dive not a lot to see so you have to cover mileage. Then turned and descended down the slope to about 170' and turned north headed back in a parallel direction to get back to where we started. We saw a few huge rocks and a few very large fish that came to check out what the we were. The bottom is covered by the moss well past 300'. If it is like Crater Lake it goes to the deepest point. after about 10 min or so we ran into some places were the moss was gone that were several hundred feet across and looked down to see that it had rolled up into these huge roles that looked like near perfect carpet rolls. Craig was on OC and limited in how deep he could go so I descended to 200' to get a better look at them. Wow it was cool; they were over 100' long and 15-20 feet in diameter. I swam over the first big one and noticed it was barren just past it and looked down to see another one that was below and started to descend to it then looked at my depth gauge and went "dam it is another 100+ feet below me Craig’s OC and raking up deco I can't go their this dive. I’ll get it on the next dive. So I took some quick video of them and we headed back toward the cove we set out from doing our deco on the slope up.

Then it started all over again. Those #$%^&* little #$%##% would not even wait until we walked the 50' back to camp with our hoods on. Little *&^%% were on our faces before we could even set the scooters down and drop our stages. We got Jungle Juiced up and ate and filled up Craig’s tanks for the next dive and set up to go deeper this time.

We got into the water scootered out dropped down and Craig’s computer was all freaked out and would not stay in the right mode. So going back down to the roles was out of the question so we did a shallower old school manual deco dive and just scootered around at 70 and 30 feet for a very long time to be sure that we got him out of the water safely and his air computer was long cleared that he was using as a backup.

Overall it was a great lake to dive in if you have a boat and can get over to the west side of the lake it looks like there are 2 walls that go all the way past 300' on the bath. chart.

I will be going back there myself and would recommend it to anyone who likes cold clear fresh water. But go later in the year when it dries out so there are none or very few of those #$%& blood sucking little $%#^&%.

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