Lady of the Woods (6/6)

I apologize for the poor quality of the image, but this image is of a nude woman that is hewn out of a volcanic boulder. It is found behind the current administration building at Crater Lake, and there is a cool story that goes along with it.

When the first construction was being done at Crater Lake in the early 1900s to make the park accessible to the public, workers would sign up for 6-year stints to work there. The only companionship any of the men had was other men who were also working there and they weren’t allowed to leave and come back. All six years were spent at the park, gruelingly working. It was rather like being in the military, except that it was considered to be too dangerous for women to be there and there wasn’t a way to go to where there were women, which wouldn’t have been allowed anyway.

One young man was very much in love with a young woman, but he didn’t have enough money to feel worthy of asking the woman to marry him. So he signed up for a tour of duty at the fledgling Crater Lake, even knowing that he wouldn’t see his lady for 6 long years. As hard as the work was, it did pay well.

He missed her terribly, though, so he did the only thing he could think of. He was not a trained sculptor, but he took a hammer and cold chisel and started gradually chipping away at a lava boulder. What you see is the result of 6 years of painstaking effort; a sculpture of his beloved.

To complete the story, in his last year at the park, the man wrote a letter to the young woman, asking her to marry him. He had little hope of a good response. She was quite beautiful, after all, and he hadn’t actually told her why he left to work at Crater Lake until he did so in his proposal letter.

It took months for his letter to reach the woman and more months for her response to reach him. She was as heartbroken as he was and her emphatic response was ‘Yes!”

After he was discharged from his duties at the park, he made his way east, back home, and the two were married. From what can be pieced together, they lived happily ever after, though that isn’t certain. Still, that is supposed to be a true story.

As kids, we used to spend hours every spring, removing the fir needles and dirt from the Lady of the Woods, though we were the only ones who ever visited her. The Park Service keeps her clean now and tourists do take the walk to see her, sometimes. She is a labor of love.