Join Thor, Bear dog, and me as we hike from Rosario Beach to Deception Pass Bridge in Northwest Washington.
This is the year of Life, Interrupted for all of us, what with the COVID-19 upheavals and more. Knowing I had major surgery in store this summer, I packed in as much outdoor activity as possible before August. So I’m now interrupting my Thailand Virtual Vacation posts to share one of those earlier summer outings: a visit to our nearby Rosario Beach and trails in Deception Pass State Park.
Once our long months of gray rain blossom into sunny summer, my native Pacific Northwest is truly glorious, and the trail from Rosario Beach on Fidalgo Island (connected by bridge to the mainland) toward the Deception Pass Bridge offers quintessential scenery along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The madrona trees are especially beautiful.
Thor, Bear dog, and I rendezvoused at the Rosario Beach parking lot with our friend Brenda. She is Bear dog’s “Aunt Brenda,” as she fostered him for the rescue group that found him wandering in the wilds in Idaho. Bear always get Very excited when we have outings with Auntie B.
We followed the winding cliffside trail toward shallow Bowman Bay and across its pebble beach to a peninsula where Coast Salish tribes had summer camps, now the site of archaeological digs. A pebble cove on its south side was a perfect lunch spot, where we could watch the swirling currents that make boat passage through the narrow channel sometimes dangerous.
Joseph Whidbey, part of Captain Vancouver’s expedition, found and renamed Deception Pass in 1792, apparently because the passage confused their routes and map-making. The island to the south of the channel was named for Whidbey and is now home to a busy (and sometimes noisy) military air field. At our distance, we weren’t bothered by the occasional plane. The soaring bridge over the channel was built in 1935, and it’s a thrill to walk across to the middle and look down into the churning currents.
A small outcrop just to the east of the channel, Ben Uhre Island, was the staging area for Uhre, his native wife, and a partner, Lawrence “Pirate” Kelly, for a human-smuggling operation in the late 1880s. They would bring in undocumented Chinese immigrants for cheap labor, another sad footnote to our local history. The “cargo” were wrapped in burlap bags, in case the boat was spotted by customs agents, in which case the bagged humans were thrown overboard to drown. Bodies would often wash up on San Juan Island at the appropriately-named Dead Man’s Bay.
For this outing, instead of hiking on to the bridge, we continued to circumnavigate the rocky islet, enjoying the craggy coastline and views westward.
The densely wooded trails featured some of the tallest native salal I’ve seen.
After a bit of unscheduled bush-whacking when the trail petered out into rabbit paths, we circled back across Bowman Bay beach to the campground. It offers one of the wonderful Civilian Conservation Corps shelters built in the 1930s to provide Depression-Era work and lasting parks infrastructure. We could use another program like that right now!
Back at our starting point at Rosario Beach, we admired the lovely cedar totem of Kwah-kwal-uhl-wut, of the Maiden of Deception Pass. Tribal legend has it that a woman of the tribe saved them from starvation by agreeing to marry a “man from the sea.”
You can still see her hair streaming like the bull kelp in the currents.
We took our towels down to the pebble beach, where Bear dog waded (he doesn’t like to swim) and I took a short swim in the beautifully clear but Very cold sea. Thor and Brenda declined a swim, but I needed to get my fix of Otter energy in the bay!
After the rush of cold clarity, I shout, “I’m alive!” and lie on the sun-hot pebbles for the perfect natural spa. We feel blessed to live in such a beautiful place in our “far corner” of the States.
*****
You will find The Rambling Writer’s blog posts here every Saturday. Sara’s latest novel from Book View Café is available in print and ebook: The Ariadne Connection. It’s a near-future thriller set in the Greek islands. “Technology triggers a deadly new plague. Can a healer find the cure?” The novel has received the Chanticleer Global Thriller Grand Prize and the Cygnus Award for Speculative Fiction. Sara has recently returned from another research trip in Greece and is back at work on the sequel, The Ariadne Disconnect. Sign up for her quarterly email newsletter at www.sarastamey.com
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