World's most beautiful lakes - Part 1

One could argue that, among the Earth’s natural features, lakes do the most with the least — they are, after all, simply static bodies of water. That flat perspective falls light-years short of the many marvels the world’s lakes offer us humans who visit them, swim in them, fish in them, boat upon them, and just plain admire them.

Crater Lake, Oregon

 Oregon’s Crater Lake, for example, presents such an instantly appealing visage, its 1,946-foot-deep, piercing blue water clasped at 6,138 feet of elevation inside a volcanic caldera, that pictures of it helped lead to creation of a national park. It’s a bit fanciful to select only16 among the world’s lakes, which total 307 million, but we hope it will spur you to get out there and see how marvelous stationary fresh water can be. As a famous lake admirer and neighbor, William Wordsworth, put it: “Never did nature betray/The heart that loved her.”

Moraine Lake, Alberta

Neighbor to another famous emerald tarn ringed by peaks in the Canadian Rockies, Alberta’s Moraine Lake is as photogenic, as stunning and as seemingly pristine as Lake Louise. The difference between the two is crowding: Tour buses wind their way up to Lake Louise by the hundreds, and skip Moraine. Both lakes bear their distinctive gemlike color as a result of glacial flour in the water that streams down from above, and as global warming melts Canada’s glaciers — many have retreated miles in the past century — it’s open to debate whether the lake’s shimmering hue will dull.

Lake Manapouri, New Zealand

 Both of its islands consist of mountainous upthrusts from the South Pacific, and New Zealand thus has numerous lakes and coastal fjords. Though its translation from Maori means “sorrowful heart,” Lake Manapouri was misnamed by early cartographers; locals call it a different name that means “many islands.” There are more than 30 of these, and the vistas presented the lake’s white sand beaches, many islands and snowcapped mountains lead many to call it New Zealand’s most scenic — quite a distinction in a land with hundreds of lakes amid innumerable mountains.

Lake Tahoe, California

 If Crater Lake has any competition for most stunning, it’s Northern California’s Lake Tahoe, which straddles the Golden State’s border with Nevada at 6,225 feet. Though at 1,645 feet it’s only second-deepest (after Crater), it’s much larger, with a surface of 191 square miles — the largest such high-elevation lake in the United States. There are, in the world, 27 million lakes larger than 2.5 acres; Tahoe is only 24th largest in the US. Its famously sapphire waters and snowcapped Sierra surroundings make it almost as iconic as Crater Lake. The clear waters are equally famous, but in danger: Tahoe’s clarity has declined from 100 feet in the late 1960s to 67 feet now. You can guess who caused that.

Lake Lucerne, Switzerland

 Few places have as many straight-up-and-down mountains as the Swiss Alps, and the lakes that lie between them are famous for the resulting panoramas. Lake Lucerne is widely considered the most scenic of all, a 19-mile-long lake backed by the northern knees of the Bernese Alps. The cog railway that climbs nearby Mount Pilatus is the world’s steepest, affording sensational views of the azure lake as it ascends grades as sharp as 48 percent to the nearly 7,000-foot summit. A meadow along the lake is the site at which the Swiss Confederation was formed, and a commemorative trail, the Swiss Path, was built around the lake at the confederation’s 700th anniversary in 1991.

Ba-Be Lake, Vietnam

 Subtropical rainforests are rarely the home of major lakes, but Vietnam’s Ba-Be Lake, set amid limestone cliffs in the monsoon zone, is one of the best-known. A place of mist-shrouded islets and quiet bays surrounded by native jungle, it is meditatively scenic. Tour boats ply the lake, which is now contained within a national park that holds endangered monkeys and gibbons. Though not large — it’s barely five miles long — its many inlets and bays make it topographically intriguing, and its waters are almost always calm, a green mirror for the surrounding rainforest.

(by MSN)