San Juan Islands

The ferry from Anacortes takes about an hour, and somewhere in the middle of it — threading between dark green islands, the water flat and metallic, a bald eagle on a snag going past — Lia turned to me and said she felt her shoulders drop. I felt it too. The San Juan Islands begin working on you before you even land, in that suspended hour on the car deck when there is nothing to do but watch the archipelago slide by and wait for whatever this is going to be. We came for a long weekend on San Juan Island itself and ended up hopping to Orcas and Lopez as well, because once you are out here the leaving feels premature.

San Juan Island and the Whales

Friday Harbor, the main town, is a cheerful cluster of docks, cafés and boat masts, and from here we took a small boat out to look for orcas. The southern resident and the transient pods hunt these waters, and though sightings are never guaranteed, we were lucky: a family of transients surfaced maybe two hundred meters off, black dorsal fins slicing up in that unhurried rhythm, one calf close to its mother. The boat cut its engine and everyone went silent. You could hear them breathe. Later we drove out to Lime Kiln Point — a lighthouse on the island’s rocky west shore known, without exaggeration, as one of the best places on earth to see whales from land — and sat on the warm rocks for two hours, scanning the strait, entirely content whether or not anything appeared.

Orcas Island and Mount Constitution

We ferried over to Orcas Island — larger, hillier, quieter — and drove up through Moran State Park to the summit of Mount Constitution, the highest point in the islands. A stone observation tower stands at the top, built to look medieval, and from its parapet the whole archipelago lay spread below us: dozens of islands in gradations of blue and green, the Cascades rising white to the east, Vancouver Island low to the north. Lia counted islands until she lost track. We ate cherries out of a paper bag and let the wind push at us, and I remember thinking that very few viewpoints actually deliver the whole geography of a place at once, and this one does.

Lopez, and the Art of Slowness

Lopez Island is the flat one, the farming one, the one where — famously — everyone waves at every passing car, a custom so ingrained that we found ourselves doing it within an hour. We rented bicycles and pedaled the gentle lanes past sheep pastures and old barns, stopping at a farm stand that ran on the honor system, a jar for the money and nobody watching. We bought a loaf of bread and a wedge of local cheese and ate it on a driftwood log at Agate Beach, the tide out, the water so still it held the sky. Lopez does not have a headline attraction. Lopez is the attraction — a whole island organized around the radical idea that there is nowhere you urgently need to be.

Getting There

The islands are reached by Washington State Ferries from Anacortes, about 90 minutes north of Seattle by car. Ferries serve San Juan, Orcas, Lopez and Shaw; in summer, vehicle reservations are essential and sell out well ahead, so book early — or leave the car on the mainland and come as a foot passenger, which is cheaper and, honestly, more in the spirit of the place. There is also a small airport on San Juan Island with flights and floatplanes from Seattle. Once on the islands, distances are short, but a bicycle or car helps; Lopez is flat and ideal for cycling, while Orcas is hilly enough to earn your descents.