In Washington State's San Juan Islands, Time Stands Still and Nature Reigns Supreme

04.05.2024 - 15:29 / cntraveler.com

On a still summer morning on Washington State's Orcas Island, I rented a pair of tandem kayaks from a sleepy-eyed, flaxen-haired attendant barely out of her teens, who quickly returned to painting watercolors in the tall grass beside the weather-beaten sales kiosk. A gentle wind went shhh through tall hemlocks as my family paddled, two by two, to a rocky islet at the center of Mountain Lake, on the flank of Mount Constitution. There we clambered ashore, and the kids, Agnes and Rex, immediately began darting among the lodgepole pines, collecting sticks and pine cones to build fairy houses. Aside from the faint smell of a forest fire burning in the Cascades and a smudge of smoke on the eastern sky, it could have been a scene from my own childhood.

Aboard the ferry from Anacortes to Friday Harbor

The Sugar Shack, an ice cream shop beside Cascade Lake on Orcas Island

When I was eight years old, my mother moved my three younger brothers and me to Anacortes, a small island town about two hours north of Seattle. It is the gateway to the San Juan Islands, an archipelago within the Puget Sound and the broader Salish Sea, which divides Washington State from Canada. As an underemployed single mom to four young boys, she needed inexpensive outlets for our considerable energy. Taking our bikes onto the ferry and spending the day in the San Juans was an ideal solution. Certain activities here—huddling inside beach forts assembled out of bleached driftwood, waving at cars while cycling along the agricultural back roads of Lopez Island, watching from the second deck for the underwater “burp” of the ferry as it departs a port—are woven into the helices of my DNA. But I hadn't been in more than two decades. So I booked a trip, to show the islands to my kids, to reconnect with them as an adult, and perhaps to have a few experiences that were out of reach for me as a child. As an added bonus, my mom came along too.

We posted up in a cozy log cabin at Lakedale lodge, a rustic mini kingdom on the island of San Juan, about 10 minutes from the main town of Friday Harbor. To enter, you cross a small causeway—the compound is an island within the island. Karl Bruno, Lakedale's well-seasoned general manager, told me that its founders were pond builders, who in the late ’60s convinced the county to raise the road so that they could create the three lakes around which the resort is now arranged. For a generation it was a campground only, but today there are yurts and canvas cottages in addition to the cabins and tranquil main lodge. Families come back every summer to play life-size checkers and chess, construct birdhouses, and fish in the lakes for cutthroat trout. Sometimes the kids return as grown-ups to have weddings here.

Morn