A Garden Sanctuary in the Sea

Guest post by Ilyssa and Dave Kyu

What sets the San Juan Islands apart isn’t just the peaceful lifestyle “away from it all.” That masks a rugged resourcefulness necessary to make ends meet. Hardships draw people toward a shared understanding that the challenges of island living are better faced together. The collaboration, cooperation, and respect necessary to hold together the community mirrors the complex conversation of sea, strait, coast, and land. The San Juans draw their power from the beauty of a community working together to heal, preserve, and regenerate the land for future generations.

In creating this collection [of campfire stories], we tried to gather a balanced mix of short stories, personal essays, and poems that capture this spirit across the San Juan Islands. These stories are meant to be read around a “fire,” whether quietly to yourself from the comfort of your couch or aloud to the people sharing the ember glow of a campfire with you. While you may be expecting classic spooky campfire tales, these are not stories for those just seeking to be entertained, but instead for those who are curious about how certain special regions came to be and why they continue to mean so much to us—because the stories we tell shape our values and our future. The stories in this book will show you how to slow down to the pace of island life. You will learn about the wildlife along the islands’ rocky coastlines, in their forests and coastal prairies, and in the straits and kelp forests that surround them; the history of those who saw the islands as a garden and those who came to build not just home but also community; and the complex ecosystems of land and water that make this region so special.

To identify themes and stories for this collection, we interviewed countless individuals who live and work here, and spent days inside libraries and bookstores across the islands. We hiked the beaches and coastal prairies, and visited museums, farms, and small businesses to fully immerse ourselves in the region’s rich natural and cultural landmarks. We organized, researched, and wrote in the cabins of ferries traveling between islands. We sought recommendations and insights from locals and combined them with our own experiences to create a guide that offers practical tips on where to go, what to do, where to camp, and perhaps most important, how to visit in ways that respect and support the resident communities, human and wild.

Whether you’ve visited a hundred times or only through the pages of this book, we hope this collection deepens your connection to the San Juan Islands and highlights how fragile yet grand life can be and how it is meant to be savored. So, strap on those binoculars, hop aboard the ferry, and join us on island time.

Following Skipjack
By Jill McCabe Johnson

From the trailhead at Obstruction Pass State Park on Orcas Island, my husband, our dog, Skipjack, and I head down the main trail a half mile to the campground and beach. Walking the woods here is a bit like time travel. Interpretive signs remind us that this land was once under glaciers. The Cordilleran Ice Sheet and its Puget Lobe covered the San Juan Islands and much of western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. The slow-moving ice scraped and exposed greywacke, a sedimentary bedrock formed four million years ago, and left in its wake a mantle of glacial till the ice had picked up in its travels.

Not unlike today’s human population in the islands, the rocks we now see come from a diversity of places and circumstances. Archeologists and anthropologists are still learning about the various peoples who have lived here over time, and, in fact, less than half a mile away is the site of a recent discovery that upended our understanding of the history of the entire Salish Sea region. The finding came in 2003 when our friends hired workers to dredge their overgrown pond. With a backhoe, the workers exposed what looked like bones from a very large animal. Unsure what to do, and worried their equipment would cause damage, they carefully dug up the skull and dozens of smaller bone fragments with their hands. Under ideal conditions, trained archeologists would have handled the site differently, testing soils as they went and meticulously mapping the depth and distribution of the bones. To be fair to the workers, though, they had no way of knowing the age of the large animal they’d unearthed or its historical significance. What to the untrained eye might have seemed like a remarkably large American buffalo, possibly from a homesteader’s farm, turned out to be Bison antiquus, a prehistoric and much bigger ancestor of today’s bison. Using carbon dating, scientists later determined the animal had been killed and butchered by Paleoindians roughly fourteen thousand years ago. The reason this find was important to archeologists is because the animal provided the first evidence of pre-Clovis habitation in the Salish Sea basin.

I look at the forest around me and imagine how back then, when the glaciers had somewhat recently receded, we would have walked on grasslands and hunted for megafauna—all while staying on the lookout for the now extinct short-faced bear. Today, there are no bears of any kind on the island, except on the rare occasion when a juvenile black bear swims over from Vancouver Island in search of a mate. Each time it happens, wildlife officials trap and transport the young bears to the Cascade Mountains. On this late spring day, instead of a grass savannah, the terrain is covered by indigenous trees, shrubs, mosses, and other plants. Where the sun penetrates the overstory, it paints a shifting light show of sunspots. Western red cedars rise like entrance pillars to the park, evocative of the traditional poles the Coast Salish have carved in the coastal Northwest for thousands of years.

Our dog sniffs his way past mahonia and salal, while I crouch to inspect tiny wildflowers like starflower and sugar scoop. We have hiked every public trail on Orcas Island—including this one, a favorite—dozens, if not hundreds, of times. We enjoy marveling at the seasons, cycles, and ambience of these woods, how it shifts with the weather as well as from the plant life in varying stages of florescence and decline. A few weeks earlier, we would have seen chocolate and fawn lilies. Another few weeks will bring madrona tree flowers, strawberry blossoms, and Nootka rose.

Each section of the trail reveals different micro-ecosystems. Here, cedar roots crisscross the path. A game I have played since childhood is to make shapes out of the roots, like looking for shapes in clouds. Today, they appear to me like dozens of small, brownish-green crocodiles swarming through a muddy river. In childhood, my sister Jenelle and I might have challenged each other to dash down the trail without getting eaten alive. I can imagine us running across the backs of the make-believe crocodiles and pretending to stomp their long jaws shut to keep them from biting us.

Up ahead, woodpecker holes pepper a Douglas-fir snag. The elongated excavations suggest the work of pileated woodpeckers, who dig into the sapwood of dying firs and pines in search of beetles, carpenter ants, and other tasty wood-boring bugs. They often hollow out nests in the cavities of trees, too. This tree, whose top is long since gone, has rows of holes wending up the trunk from ground level. Well above my head are two larger, partially excavated holes, possibly the start of a nest that was later abandoned. We stop and, with the aid of an app on my phone that can record and identify bird calls, listen for sounds of a pileated woodpecker—its high-pitched, pulsing sound or its clucking calls that I swear sound like a louder, more fervent version of our brother-in-law’s pet hens. The songbirds almost seem in concert with one another. Their trills layer and braid. I’m glad for the app because there are so many birds, I can’t distinguish the individual calls—it identifies song sparrows, Pacific wrens, and orange-crowned warblers, but no woodpeckers.

Skipjack runs ahead as far as his retractable leash will allow. His yellow bandana flounces in jaunty contrast with his black-and-white-spotted fur. While he snuffles at the base of a red alder, I take time to enjoy succulents in bloom. The broadleaf sedum, whose Latin name is Sedum spathulifolium, loves this rocky habitat and has a yellow, starburst-like flower even brighter than the dog’s bandana. The plants cling to the thin soil scattered among several larger stones lining this part of the trail. Nearby, Castilleja hispida, also known as harsh Indian paintbrush, blooms in a vivid orange-red atop long, hairy stems with lance-shaped leaves. I recognize this perennial that often stays green long after the other perennials fade in the fall, not because it has a longer growing cycle but because its roots are parasitic. I scan the neighboring plants to see which might be having their water and nutrients stolen, maybe snowberry or oceanspray, but without digging into the roots I won’t be able to tell. Next, a patch of shortspur seablush forms a carpet of deep pink blossoms over leaves that look like wings on either side of the flowers’ stems. At first, I mistake the ones in bud form for wild allium of the onion family, but once I see their petals leafed out, I know they are in the honeysuckle family. There are so many flowers in bloom on this day in mid-May, the bumblebees and other pollinators have plenty to savor, as do we.

Perhaps my favorite section of the trail is where a copse of bigleaf maples towers above. On sunny days like now, and especially in spring when the leaves are bright green, the canopy becomes a mosaic of brilliant greens that glimmer with light. I could stand dazzled here all afternoon, but Skipjack has spotted a Douglas squirrel partway up the trunk of a western hemlock. Resembling more of a chipmunk than the introduced red and gray squirrels, Douglas squirrels are indigenous and prolific where they thrive in undisturbed forests. This one barks sharp warnings to Skipjack, but, more curious than anything, the dog merely watches and doesn’t bark back.

We continue on the trail through a small campground and to the beach, where we can now see a vast expanse of the earlier mentioned rocks left by glacial till, such as granite, quartzite, volcanic tuff, conglomerates, jasper, agate, and more. Many have been polished by their movement with the tides. Some expose jagged, broken edges. The overall effect appears to be millions of small pebbles in varying shades of gray, until we look closely and find tones of ivory, burgundy, and peach, plus creamy yellows and soft greens that range from sea foam to dark seaweed.

Today’s especially low tide has revealed colonies of barnacles attached to anything sturdy enough to hold them. Although their lifespan is only about five to ten years, the crustaceans have existed on earth for at least 325 million years. The receding tide has also exposed tidepools rich in miniature sea life. Anemone tentacles riffle in the moving water. A frilled dogwinkle with its peach snail shell has bored into a largish barnacle to access the tender meat inside. Sea stars like to feed on barnacles, too. We used to see hundreds of a local sea star called the Pacific blood star in colors ranging from bright orange to purple at this beach. In 2013 to 2014, a wasting disease nearly wiped out the sea stars all along the western coast of North America. Fortunately, the population is on the rebound. With each visit to the park, we look for them lounging with their spiny rays lolling over each other, like how puppies flop in a heap after play.

The water appears calm, almost glassine. To the south and east lies Obstruction Island, beyond that Blakely Island, and in the distance across the Salish Sea, Mount Baker rises amidst the Cascade Mountains, still partially clad in winter’s snow. On another day, we might see shorebirds such as great blue herons, kites, or the black oystercatcher with its bright orange beak crossing our view, but this afternoon we spot only seagulls who swoop and call with their plaintive, almost haunting cries. Two summers ago, we saw Southern Resident killer whales here hunting for salmon maybe a quarter mile offshore. The orcas glided along the surface of the water while whale-watching boats cut their engines and bobbed in the waves a respectful distance away.
[…]

And who knows what other secrets this land holds? In the time since the nearby Bison antiquus discovery, others have been found on the island, and only a couple miles north of us, on Sucia Island, paleontologists discovered the first dinosaur fossil ever found in Washington State. While looking for marine fossils, they spotted a partial femur, or thigh bone, embedded in the soil with rock and fossilized clamshells. Eventually, the scientists were able to identify it as being in the theropod family of two-legged, meat-eating dinosaurs. Picture a smaller version of Velociraptor or Tyrannosaurus rex that lived roughly eighty million years ago, long before humans ever walked the earth. It puts our brief time on the planet, and especially our brief time on this trail, into perspective.

And yet, I can’t help but feel a part of it all. Fleeting, yes, but I’m grateful to be here experiencing this moment in time, on this island, in a world layered with all that’s come before, and ready for all that’s yet to come. For now, I’m content with everyday marvels, like the time we watched bald eagles teach their adolescent young how to fish, or the day we encountered piebald deer with a rare genetic coloring that makes them more white than brown. I still hope to see the delicately mottled pattern of black, white, and yellow-green wings of the island marble butterfly, among the most endangered butterflies in the world, thriving once again throughout the islands as it flits along flower to flower.

About This Story

We learned about Jill McCabe Johnson after spotting her poetry collection Diary of the One Swelling Sea and an anthology she coedited called For Love of Orcas at Darvill’s Bookstore on Orcas Island. Speaking to the folks at Darvill’s, we learned she is co-owner of the Kangaroo House Bed and Breakfast down the road in Eastsound, one of the longest running B&B’s in the San Juan Islands. Jill also offers this space for creative residencies, retreats, and workshops. We were thrilled to have her accept our invitation to take us along, with her words, on one of her favorite hikes with her husband and their trusty companion, Skipjack. She is a knowledgeable observer of the wild and wonderful things one might see along the way and also brings awareness of the millennia that came before.
Jill closes with a wish to see the island marble butterfly—a species found only in the San Juan Islands—thrive. Declared extinct in 1908, the species was rediscovered during a butterfly survey at American Camp in 1998 and was listed as a federally protected endangered species in 2020. Since 2008, Western Washington University and the US Fish and Wildlife Service have closely monitored this species, and the San Juan Island National Historical Park has maintained a captive breeding program to reintroduce adult butterflies into the prairie habitat. They can be identified by the green-and-white marbling on the undersides of their wings and are most commonly spotted on San Juan Island, feasting on wild mustard plants along the grassy coastline during flight season from April to June, though some have also been reported on Lopez Island.
— Ilyssa and Dave Kyu

Excerpted and adapted from “FOLLOWING SKIPJACK,” CAMPFIRE STORIES: THE SAN JUAN ISLANDS – TALES & TRAVEL COMPANION edited by Ilyssa Kyu and Dave Kyu (September 2025). Published by Mountaineers Books. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher.