Blind Island Marine State Park History

Blind Island Marine State Park is a favorite campsite for kayakers located in the heart of the San Juan Archipelago a short distance offshore from Shaw Island.

A Rocky Island

The San Juan Islands are distinct from most of Puget Sound in that they feature shorelines with exposures of hard bedrock, rather than the bluffs of clay, sand and gravel left by Ice Age glaciers that are predominant on most of Washington’s Salish Sea, the state’s inland saltwater passages.

The rocks that make up Blind Island are part of a group of rocks that may have begun forming around a mid-ocean rift in a tectonic plate. The basalt lava erupted at the rift was slowly buried. Chert (a form of the mineral quartz) formed as tiny oceanic organisms died and sank into the depths, covering the volcanic basalt. Sediments eroded from nearby landmasses in turn covered the chert as the tectonic plate slowly moved over the Earth’s mantle, driven by heat currents within the planet. Geologists are still puzzling out the sequence of events that ultimately thrust these rocks over younger rocks as they collided with the North American continent millions of years ago.

Paddlers approaching the island will see fractured, jumbled rocks at the shore, many covered with a veneer of bright orange lichens.

Indigenous Land

The park lies within the traditional territory of Coast Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Lummi Nation, Samish Indian Nation, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, and First Nations in Canada.

For thousands of years the lands and waters of the San Juan Archipelago have provided habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures. As winter days lengthen into spring, herring and herring roe collect in the eelgrass beds near shore. A little later, spring Chinook salmon pass through the island channels. Early summer brings sockeye salmon, harvested for millennia with reef nets. Sea urchins are gathered by expert divers in late summer, and clamming peaks in the fall.

European Competition

In the 1700’s many European nations attempted to discover and claim a “Northwest Passage” connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Spanish Crown claimed exclusive rights to colonize the west coast of North America based on the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Eight Spanish expeditions between 1774 and 1790 charted parts of today’s Pacific Northwest coast and established a Spanish settlement at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island. In 1791, Spanish Naval Officer Francisco de Eliza y Reventa was sent to reinforce the Spanish presence at Nootka Sound and direct further exploration of the Strait of Juan de Fuca as a possible Northwest Passage.

Spain claimed the area as part of its Territorio de Nutka but relinquished the claim to the United States in the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty, later confirmed by newly independent Mexico. Dual claims to the region by the US and Britain were negotiated and resolved in 1846, but the status of the San Juan Archipelago remained disputed until the competing claims were adjudicated by a commission appointed by German Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1872.

Local tribes had ceded ownership of the area to the US federal government under duress in the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855, in spite of the as-yet unsettled colonial administration of the San Juan Archipelago. After the jurisdiction was settled, the ceded lands became part of the federal public domain lands. The tribes reserved rights to harvest natural resources in their usual and accustomed places, including the lands and waters surrounding Blind Island.

Blind Island, at 2.4 acres, was never transferred out of the federal public domain, although the apple trees, non-native garden plants and water catchment cisterns on the island were purportedly established by John Fox and his son (John Jr.) who occupied the island without legal title, living a subsistence lifestyle until the mid-20^th century.

The island purportedly received its present name during maritime surveys, as it was noted that the coastal indentation in Shaw Island where it is located is only visible to mariners directly from the north, thus it is “blind” from any other approaches.

Making a Park

On March 29, 1970, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) signed a 50-year lease of Blind Island for park purposes. A primitive campsite was developed by the WSPRC, primarily for use by paddlers. As at many of the remote San Juan Island marine parks, the WSPRC installed a composting toilet on Blind Island, in 1980. The composting toilet converts waste into inert material through decomposition by bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms, meeting the needs of visitors to one of Washington’s least-visited state parks with the smallest impact to the fragile island environment.

Cascadia Marine Trail

In the mid-1950s, a veteran of the World War II 10th Mountain Division, Tom Steinburn, joined with Washington mountaineer/geologist Wolf Bauer to begin exploring the reaches of Puget Sound by kayak. He noted that when traveling by kayak “your equipment carries you instead of you carrying your equipment.” He would go on to help found the Washington Water Trails Association and advocate for the 1993 establishment of the Cascadia Marine Trail, a 150-mile route on the waters of Washington’s Salish Sea honoring the water transportation utilized by the region’s Indigenous people for thousands of years. At the June 26, 1999 event recognizing the Cascadia Marine Trail as one of 17 National Millenium Trails, First Lady Hillary Clinton said that the trails “tell the story of our nation's past and will help to create a positive vision for our future.”

Blind Island State Park’s four primitive campsites are now designated solely for use of human-powered boaters as part of the Cascadia Marine Trail, along with sites in about 30 other Washington State Parks.

San Juan Islands National Monument

In 2011, a group of leaders from San Juan County began advocating for the establishment of a protected area made up of the remaining federal public domain lands located in the San Juan Archipelago, including Blind Island. In response, US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar directed the manager of the BLM Wenatchee Field Office, Karen Kelleher, to coordinate development of a proposal to designate the lands as a National Conservation Area. On November 10, 2011, Salazar forwarded a report to Congress outlining a proposal for the protected area.

Senator Maria Cantwell introduced legislation in the US Senate to accomplish the task, and a hearing was held on the legislation on March 22, 2012. However, opposition to the proposal was voiced by Representative Doc Hastings, who stated that “the country can’t afford any more public land,” and refused to advance the proposal.

On March 25, 2013, President Barack Obama issued Presidential Proclamation 8947, designating the San Juan Islands National Monument to protect the federal lands, including Blind Island and other BLM property leased by the WSPRC at Patos Island and Posey Island. In the proclamation, he noted that the monument would serve as a “refuge of scientific and historic treasures and a classroom for generations of Americans.”