San Juan Islands

The ferry threads channels where harbour seals haul out close enough to count whiskers. Forested islands rise to both sides, eagles turning above the Douglas firs, and the salt air carries cedar and kelp. Sometimes a black dorsal fin breaks the surface.

More than 170 named islands scatter across the inland sea between Washington and Vancouver Island, four of them served by state ferries whose vehicle decks double as wildlife platforms. San Juan Island keeps the archipelago's best story: in 1859 the United States and Great Britain nearly went to war here over possession of the islands, a crisis ignited by the death of a single pig, and the rival English and American camps survive as a national historical park beside one of the last native prairies in the region. Orcas still patrol the channels, told honestly: the marine-mammal-hunting Bigg's orcas are now the common sighting, while the endangered Southern Residents' once-reliable summer visits have thinned with the salmon runs. On Orcas Island, a 1936 stone tower on Mount Constitution looks across the whole scatter to the Cascades, and Friday Harbor stays small enough to walk end to end in fifteen minutes.