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Manchester State Park is located on the site of a military reservation established for the defense of Puget Sound in 1899. The solid bedrock exposed at Middle Point in the park is an unusual feature on the Puget Sound coastline, found only at Rich Passage and a few areas on the western shore of Hood Canal. In the rest of the region, most bedrock is buried under a blanket of glacial debris left behind by the glaciers of the last ice age.

The End of Hood Canal

Belfair State Park features a popular stretch of beach between the mouths of Big Mission Creek and Little Mission Creek at the tip of the hook of Hood Canal. Today’s Belfair State Park was covered by glacial ice during the last ice age. The finger-like waterways of South Puget Sound were excavated by highly pressurized meltwater streams that developed as the ice began to melt.

Bridgeport State Park provides recreational opportunities on the shore of the Columbia River reservoir created by the hydroelectric dam named for Nez Perce Chief Joseph. The park is located in a part of the Colville Indian Reservation (where Chief Joseph lived in exile after his defeat by the US Army in the 1877 Nez Perce War) that was removed from Indigenous trust ownership by a Presidential Proclamation and transferred to non-Indigenous homesteaders in the 1920s.

Rasar State Park lies midway along the Skagit River’s winding path between the rugged North Cascade Mountains and the Salish Sea. The Skagit River, part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, is the second largest river on the west coast of the contiguous United States, after the Columbia. Like much of the Skagit River Valley, the park land is naturally terraced as the river has cut into glacial deposits from the ice age.