Crater Lake National Park | How do you save a lake — twice?

This episode explains how Mount Mazama collapsed into the bluest water in the world, and the native origin story of the lake. Then we tell the story of William Gladstone Steel: a fifteen-year-old kid in Kansas who read about a mysterious blue lake on his sandwich wrapper, spent fifteen years just trying to find it, and then spent seventeen more fighting to protect it — a thousand letters, one book mailed to every member of Congress, six dead bills, and finally a president willing to lean on the Speaker of the House. And we ride the trolley along Rim Drive to see what all that stubbornness bought: a lake saved, wild and beautiful, just as it was, for all future generations.

Sign the kids' petition to Save the Mazama Newt: https://www.change.org/p/director-nesvik-list-the-mazama-newt-as-endangered-before-it-s-gone/

Thanks to Mac Savage (https://www.youtube.com/@MacSavage503/) a documentary filmmaker and his mother Barbara Alatorre who worked for over 40 years, writing stories and preserving the history of the Klamath tribe. We are grateful for their permission to share and amplify this history. You can hear the full oral history in this video: Klamath Tribal History & Legends Part I (2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doHIYWCxlfM

Learn more about the Klamath Tribes — the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin, whose homeland this has always been — at klamathtribes.org.

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