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Lime Kiln Point State Park provides an opportunity for park visitors to view orca whales from shore in an area with connections to the cultural stories of the picturesque San Juan Islands.

Suspect Terranes

The bedrock landscape of the San Juan Islands is made of assemblages of rocks called terranes that have been thrust over one another like a stack of cards by tectonic forces.

Fort Worden Historical State Park preserves an example of a US Army defense project from the beginning of the 20th century. Its strategic location on a high bluff at the entrance to Puget Sound also features sweeping vistas of the islands, waterways and mountain ranges that have attracted people here for millennia.

Jackson House State Park Heritage Site is a 1.4-acre day-use park at Jackson Prairie. The park is the setting of a homestead cabin built by John R. Jackson, one of the first Euro-Americans to settle north of the Columbia River and a significant figure in early Washington territorial history.

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.

Bay View State Park is perched above the waves of Padilla Bay at the western edge of the Skagit Valley. The scenic spot lies within the traditional territories of Coast Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Samish Indian Nation, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, Suquamish Tribe and Lummi Nation. For thousands of years the rich estuary and its extensive eelgrass beds have provided habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures.

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.

Fort Casey Historical State Park preserves an example of a US Army defense project from the beginning of the 20th century. Its strategic location on a high bluff at the entrance to Puget Sound also features an historic lighthouse and sweeping vistas of the islands, waterways and mountain ranges that have attracted people here for millennia.

The story of Mount Pilchuck State Park goes deep. The distinctive blocks of light-colored quartz monzonite (a rock like granite but with a smaller proportion of quartz crystals) that a hiker must scramble over to reach the historic fire lookout were once molten magma slowly cooling thousands of feet below the earth’s surface. The mechanisms of plate tectonic subduction elevated the rocks to 5,324 feet above sea level to put Mount Pilchuck’s prominent alpine summit barely 18 miles from salt water at the Snohomish River estuary.

“…they topped the last hill and saw the abundance nature had spread before them.