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Lake Sammamish State Park is one of Washington’s most popular state parks, attracting visitors from the large cities and towns nearby with its attractive beaches, picnic areas, athletic fields and open space.

Tongues of the great Pleistocene glaciers that excavated the passageways of Puget Sound also dug the nearly seven-mile-long basin of Lake Sammamish. Today’s park encompasses the floodplains of Issaquah Creek and Tibbetts Creek at the lake’s inlet.

Ocean City State Park has been an oceanfront destination for generations. The park faces the Pacific Ocean at North America’s “active margin,” where the ocean-floor Juan de Fuca tectonic plate slowly sinks beneath the continent, sliding at a rate of about 13 feet per century in the plate’s subduction zone. Sudden movements of the Juan de Fuca Plate can cause earthquakes that may modify the land surface and generate tsunamis.

Posey Island Marine State Park is a small island featuring a popular campsite for kayakers that is easily accessible from the northwestern part of San Juan 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.

Washington’s Sand Sea

Potholes State Park is set in a unique environment dominated by ancient sand dunes and a modern irrigation reservoir.

In the final stages of the most recent ice age, masses of glacial ice repeatedly blocked meltwater drainage, creating huge bodies of impounded water in northern Washington, Idaho and Montana. When the ice dams melted or were breached by the sheer weight of water behind them, gigantic Ice Age floods swept over the landscape.

Turn Island Marine State Park preserves an entire island that lies just offshore from a point on the eastern side of San Juan 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.

When we picture an active military fort, we think of soldiers running drills, gun batteries firing, inspections and loading mines into the river. All of those were normal, everyday aspects of life at a Columbia River fort. However, that only tells one side of the story of life at these forts. The other side of the story looks past wartime and focuses on peacetime, when families of soldiers stationed at the fort could come live alongside them.

With so many lakes, rivers, bays, inlets and ocean shores, it’s no wonder boating, paddling, angling and beach camping are popular in Washington, especially when the weather gets warm.

Washington State Parks manages public boat ramps, docks, launches and mooring buoys, and each has its own pass or permit requirements.

Here is your handy guide to help you determine which passes you may need for your favorite water activity:

Burrows Island Marine State Park preserves the majority of a wild-wooded island just offshore of Anacortes. Its forested summit rises nearly 650 feet above the churning waters that surround the island. The bedrock that makes up Burrows Island is part of a larger assemblage of rocks that outcrop on nearby islands and collectively make up an ophiolite sequence, a distinctive formation of rocks formed where the sea floor has spread apart at a tectonic plate boundary.

The Bay of Despond

Today’s Jarrell Cove State Park was covered by glacial ice during the most recent ice age. The fingerlike waterways of South Puget Sound including the inverted Y shape of Jarrell Cove and Pickering Passage outside its entrance were excavated by highly pressurized meltwater streams that developed as the thousands-of-feet-thick ice began to melt. The park’s namesake cove features deep waters and a tall tidal range. Low tides yield extensive muddy banks.

A Mountain on an Island

The pinnacle of Moran State Park, Mount Constitution, rises 2,407 feet directly from sea level to the second highest point on an oceanic island in the contiguous 48 US states. The rocks that make up the heights of Mount Constitution began as lava erupting on the ocean floor or slowly accumulating sediments formed by skeletons of marine microorganisms, windblown dust and volcanic ash settling to the ocean floor. The pillow basalts, chert and shale seen at rocky exposures in the park are evidence of these events.

Patos Island Marine State Park provides a favorite campsite for paddlers and moorage for sailors, located on the northernmost edge of the San Juan Archipelago, noted for its historic lighthouse and wild, remote shores.

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.

Saint Edward State Park hugs the shore of Lake Washington, the second largest natural lake in Washington, surpassed in area only by Lake Chelan. Tongues of the great Pleistocene glaciers that excavated the passageways of Puget Sound also dug the nearly 20 mile long basin of Lake Washington. For thousands of years, the lake received fresh water from the Sammamish River at its north end and drained through the Black River into Puget Sound at its south end.

Between the Mountains and the Sea

Dosewallips State Park features extensive tidelands at the mouth of the Dosewallips River on Hood Canal. Erosion of the Olympic Mountains to the west combined with the steep gradient of the river carries a large quantity of sediment downriver. Silt, sand and gravel are deposited by the river when it reaches the flatter terrain in the park, naturally braiding its riverbed with many channels as it flows towards Hood Canal. The large fan of sediment and mud at the river’s mouth has long been a rich estuary.

"Its grim black walls of basalt frown across a broken chain of linear lakes, some of them as wide as the coulee floor ….. potholes a hundred feet deep in rock, dry cataracts one hundred to four hundred feet high, and river bars one hundred to two hundred feet thick … under the present semiarid climate it lies naked of forest mantle, every detail of its form clearly displayed." -J Harlen Bretz, Geologist

State Parks’ professional arbor crew blends science, technology and tree work for public safety and conservation.

“What is your earliest tree memory?” Washington State Parks Arborist Mik Miazio once asked visitors at Millersylvania.  

Most recalled climbing trees or eating fruit from neighboring orchards. Grandparents’ houses and childhood backyards were common themes.  

Trees and forest ecosystems are among Washington’s icons, and many nature lovers equate the outdoors with trees. 

And a brief accounting of the hard work that has made it amazing!

By Kelsey Lang, Interpretive Specialist, Fort Worden State Park

My oh, my! It’s been a busy fall, winter and spring at the Commanding Officer’s Quarters Museum. But before diving into recent developments, let’s rewind a bit. On January 1, 2024, Fort Worden State Park officially assumed operations of the museum from its previous steward, the Jefferson County Historical Society.

A Rain-fed River Runs Through It

Bogachiel State Park hugs the bank of the Bogachiel River (locally known as the “Bogie”) on the northwestern reaches of the Olympic Peninsula, providing recreational opportunities on the windward slope of the Olympic Mountains. Storms and moisture rise as they are forced up over the Olympic Mountains from the Pacific Ocean. When the moist air rises, it expands and cools. The colder air is less able to hold moisture, so clouds and precipitation form. Bogachiel State Park averages over 120 inches of annual precipitation!

Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park preserves a swath of semi-arid shrub-steppe in central Washington that hides a secret. Buried within the gravelly and sandy soils of the park’s landscape are remnants of an ancient forest, turned to stone by a fortunate convergence of geologic events.

Flood Basalts and Lahars

Ginkgo Petrified Forest lies near the western margin of the Columbia River Basalt Group, a geologic formation made up of hundreds of distinct lava flows that flooded over 80,000 square miles of Washington and Oregon.

“Islands are still the domain of the explorers, the adventurers, the discoverers.”  --Alexander L. Bond, conservation biologist

Jones Island Marine State Park, an entire island off the southwest corner of Orcas Island in the San Juan Archipelago, offers each visitor a chance to connect with their inner adventurer. Its hills rise nearly 200 feet above a low isthmus. Rock outcrops on its rugged shore reveal that the bedrock of the island was formed deep on the ocean floor and uplifted above the water’s surface by the forces of plate tectonics.

The 31-mile Klickitat State Park Trail hugs the meanders of the Klickitat River and its tributary, Swale Creek, revealing stories of massive volcanic flows, bubbling mineral springs, timeless Indigenous subsistence traditions, ephemeral attempts at wresting profits from the land, and a delightful environment of oak and pine woodlands and grasslands. The trail stretches from a windswept plateau 1,600 feet above sea level to the river’s confluence with the mighty Columbia River barely 100 feet above sea level.

Yakima Sportsman State Park owes its preservation and its distinctive name to the generosity of a group of waterfowl hunting enthusiasts who purchased lands in the Yakima River floodplain in the 1940s.

Folds, Floods, Meanders and Mines

The park is situated in a geographic area called the Yakima Fold Belt, an area of central Washington where tectonic compression of the layered Columbia River Basalt lava flows results in a series of parallel ridges that run perpendicular to the force of the stress—kind of like kicking a rug creates ridges in the fabric.

Cape Disappointment State Park spreads over the land north of the point where the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean meet. The park includes three headlands of basalt rock cliffs: Cape Disappointment overlooking the river, North Head above the strand of Long Beach, and McKenzie Head, midway between the other two headlands. The basalt bedrock of these wave-pounded cliffs are ancient lava flows that erupted on the ocean floor. Encountering the cold ocean water, the lava quickly hardened into bulbous masses geologists call pillow lava.