A tree has been floating upright in this lake since 1896
A tree has been floating upright in this lake since 1896 Ellsworth Toohey 5:00 am Tue Jul 28, 2026 Old Man of the Lake — NPS / Public domain (via Wikipedia) A 30-foot tree trunk has been floating upright in Oregon's Crater Lake since at least 1896, when a geologist first wrote it down. Known as the Old Man of the Lake, it's most likely a hemlock, about two feet across at the waterline, and it stands roughly four feet out of the water, its exposed top bleached white and worn smooth. Carbon dating suggests the tree is at least 450 years old.
- ▪A tree has been floating upright in this lake since 1896 Ellsworth Toohey 5:00 am Tue Jul 28, 2026 Old Man of the Lake — NPS / Public domain (via Wikipedia) A 30-foot tree trunk has been floating upright in Oregon's Crater Lake since at lea
- ▪Known as the Old Man of the Lake, it's most likely a hemlock, about two feet across at the waterline, and it stands roughly four feet out of the water, its exposed top bleached white and worn smooth.
- ▪Carbon dating suggests the tree is at least 450 years old.
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/07/28/old-man-of-the-lake.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-28T12:24:46.034Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-28T12:24:46.034Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | QDvGJzObawh_ · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A tree has been floating upright in this lake since 1896 Ellsworth Toohey 5:00 am Tue Jul 28, 2026 Old Man of the Lake — NPS / Public domain (via Wikipedia) A 30-foot tree trunk has been floating upright in Oregon's Crater Lake since at least 1896, when a geologist first wrote it down. Known as the Old Man of the Lake, it's most likely a hemlock, about two feet across at the waterline, and it stands roughly four feet out of the water, its exposed top bleached white and worn smooth. Carbon dating suggests the tree is at least 450 years old. It doesn't stay put. When officials in Washington asked for its position to be tracked between July and September of 1938, observers found it had covered at least 62 miles in three months, moving fastest on days of high wind.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.