Cascades Vacation 1999

Chapter 5: Puget Sound

With this video imprinted indelibly in my memory, I was surprised to see that the replacement bridge looked so much like the original. It has been in place for many decades now, without risk of failure, so we crossed it without worry.

The Kitsap Peninsula is about as close to an island as you can get without actually being one. It is attached to the mainland about 20 miles north of Olympia, but it comes so close to the mainland in so many other places, that it is hard to keep track of.

The Tacoma Narrows is one of those places. Once we crossed onto the Kitsap, we drove north to Bremerton, the largest town on the Kitsap, and spent the night.

June 13: Peninsulas, Islands, and Ferries.

We stopped and ate a very relaxed breakfast while looking across the sound at the city. I took this picture of Seattle from our breakfast spot. While we were eating a large ferry came by. The ferries in Puget Sound are operated by the State of Washington, and some of them are very large. This one just crosses back and forth between Bainbridge and Seattle, providing access to the city for those who wish to live in a much less urban setting. There must be a substantial amount of inconvenience and expense associated with living here, or else everyone would do it, and the spell would be broken.

After breakfast we drove back to the Kitsap and continued north to the Hood Canal bridge. The Hood Canal is a natural body of water, not a man-made canal. It separates the Kitsap from the Olympic Peninsula and the beautiful Olympic mountain range. We crossed over this very interesting bridge which has a bulge in the middle is where the drawspan retracts when the bridge opens for boat traffic. We later discovered that this pontoon bridge sank during a storm in 1979 when someone left some hatches open. Once we were safely on the Olympic Peninsula, we drove north and then west, heading for Port Angeles and the Olympic National Park.

After consulting with the ranger, we decided to drive east on route 101 past the town of Forks, to get to the Hoh Rain Forest section of the park. The east side of the Olympic peninsula gets a tremendous amount of rain, and the Olympic mountains, although not more than about 8,000 feet in altitude, cast a big "rain shadow" over most of Puget Sound, so that Seattle and the San Juan Islands get much less rain than they get here.

We took several hikes through parts of this temperate rain forest. One of the more interesting observations made in the interpretive material was that young trees have great difficulty finding a place to sprout from on the forest floor. Because of this, fallen trees provide an ideal sprouting environment as they decompose. It was not difficult to observe full sized trees standing on stilt-like roots, showing the nature of their early development. Not only that, but in many cases these trees would all be in a line, indicating where the "nurse" log had lain many years ago.

Afterwards, we drove back through Port Angeles toward Port Townsend. At Port Townsend there is a ferry that crosses to Whidbey Island. The ranger had told us to be careful about the ferry schedule for this crossing, because the new moon was causing a Spring Tide. At this time, the high tides are higher and low tides lower than usual. For some reason, this particular Spring Tide was a "once-a-year" tide, so it was well covered on the TV Weather coverage. Locals were going down to the tidal flats at low tide to catch crabs and other things that were exposed at low tide only rarely. The effect on the ferry is due to the fact that the dock on Whidbey Island is accessed by a shallow channel. The ferry cancels runs during low tides. More than the usual number were being canceled for this particular one.

The low tide was around noon, though, and we needed to cross in the late afternoon, so our ferry crossing was unaffected. We drove up Whidbey island, past oak Harbor, to Deception Pass. This pass is actually a strait that connects Whidbey Island to Fidalgo Island, to its north. It almost looks like the islands are connected, and that is what prompted the name. They are connected by a bridge, and we crossed onto Fidalgo Island, and spent the night nearby on the mainland.

June 14: San Juan Island

The ferry from Anacortes stops at the three largest of the San Juan Islands, Lopez island, Orca Island, and San Juan island. We only had one day, so we felt we had to pick just one for a visit. We chose San Juan Island because it is the westernmost island, and offers the best opportunities for whale watching, at least according to a travel artical we had read.

We enjoyed our ferry ride, and eventually arrived at Friday Harbor, the main port of San Juan Island. It has a very colorful waterfront area, with shops and restaurants. We drove through town and headed right for Lime Kiln Point State Park. This park had been written up in an article about the San Juans that Steffi had seen in the New York Times travel section, months earlier. It is supposed to be one of the best places to find Killer Whales (Orcas). The reason for this is that between the island and Vancouver Island, Canada, lies the Haro Strait, a very deep strait with fast currents, which the whales like.

The parking lot was closed for construction, so we had to park at an alternate parking area, and hike down to the point. This took a while, but it was a nice hike, so we didn't mind. About noon, we arrived at the point. Next to the lighthouse, there was a whiteboard that had written on it "Last Whales sighted at... 5AM". The article said that sometimes you have to get lucky. There are no guarantees that you will see whales at any given time.

Steffi overheard the person who works at the lighthouse tell others that they should stay and wait for the whales, because it was just about low tide (and a VERY low tide at that) and after the tide began to turn, the water in the strait will begin to flood in through the strait. They were expecting a very strong flood tide because the sun and moon were aligned.

We took this advice. We went a bit away from the lighthouse so I could get a good picture of it, and looked out over the strait at Vancouver Island, and waited for the whales to appear. Unlike the Gray Whales we had seen earlier on the coast of Oregon, these do not migrate. They live all year round in Puget Sound.

We did not have to wait very long, the whales began to appear. They are easily recognizable as Orcas by the tall dorsal fin. They did not stay visible for long though, so getting a good picture proved to be fairly difficult. This is the best one I took. The whales came in groups (pods). they swam against the current. The strong current makes for an ideal feeding environment for them. We're glad we didn't miss them. We went for another hike at the park after they stopped, and on our way back, someone who had just arrived asked us when the whales were going to appear. I didn't have the heart to explain.

We spent the rest of the afternoon seeing other sites on the Island. American Camp and British Camp are part of the National Park System. We returned to Friday Harbor before dinner to put our car in line for the ferry return to Anacortes. While waiting for the ferry, we ordered Crab Cakes at the open-air restaurant and watched the harbor. This was a perfect way to finish the trip off. Not strenuous, but very relaxing, and with the whale sightings, very rewarding. The ferry ride also has a stress-reducing effect.

We actually had one more day to spend, and we spent part of it sightseeing again in Seattle. We did the standard tourist things like the Space Needle and the Monorail. We actually enjoyed most just going back to the open air market that was our first stop. We bought some Rainier Cherries, and later devoured them at the motel. We could get those at home, though. We spent the rest of the day cleaning out the car, repacking our things, and just relaxing. We needed a down day.

The trip back to Michigan was uneventful except that 10 or 15 minutes after we took off, we got a view of the top of Mt. Rainier out the window. So we said goodbye to the Pacific Northwest with a parting photograph of it. The colors are courtesy of the window, of course. If you look carefully in the distance, you can see the Mt. St. Helens Crater just to the left of Mt. Rainier. This shot also reminded us of how lucky we were that we had such great weather on the mountain that Saturday. On this day, we would not have seen much since we would have been below the clouds.

The pictures and text are all Copyright © 1999, Steven R. Weiss. All rights reserved.

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