1004 Miles for May: Pilgrimage to Turn Point
Historic Turn Point Lighthouse, and the active Coast Guard navigational aid. . Photo by Phil Jones.
The clock had just struck 11:00pm on May 31st, 2021, and I was descending a fast hill into Greenbank, WA, on a fully loaded touring bicycle heading for home and a 1000 mile monthly total. I did a quick calculation, and realized that it was going to be down to the wire. Go too slow, and I’d miss 1000 miles by mere minutes!
At 11:58pm I arrived home, and calculated up a mileage of 1004 for the month! This month-long part of the mission was complete!
My origin that morning had been Stuart Island where my girlfriend Amber’s family has land. Just as going to the tar sands had been a pilgrimage, this trip from which I return had been as well—in the other direction. On the northwest corner of Stuart Island is the Turn Point Lighthouse, and beyond it where Boundary Pass meets Haro Strait is the most likely site of a Salish Sea diluted bitumen spill.
If a spill were to happen here, this quiet place would feel the hammer fall first.
Map adapted from Wikimedia Common\@hotshot977.
There is no ferry service to Stuart Island, and the only ways on it are by boat, or one of the two small airstrips. In this case, some of Amber’s family were kind enough to stuff me and my oversized brute of a bike onto their family boat for the trip to and from there!
Even compared to the pace of living on Whidbey Island, Stuart is quiet. Everything is off-grid, and the nearest grocery store means a trip by water to Roche Harbor (recall my earlier blog!).
Prevost Harbor and Mt Baker (Kulshan) in the distance. Photo by Phil Jones.
At one point, her family took me on an evening circumnavigation of the island. Whipping around counter-clockwise, our first destination was Turn Point itself, which I had heard of in charts and conversations. It was great to see the place itself in real life rising steeply out of the water.
While rounding the corner, we spotted a small black cormorant stubbornly sitting atop a particularly large egg. Eagles and ravens were everywhere, as well as kingfishers, and possibly the occasional puffin. During our time in Haro Strait however, not one but two large ships passed, reminding us that this is a busy shipping lane. It’s hard to imagine the tanker component of this going up by 700%!
At the south end of Stuart Island is a smaller island the locals call “Happy Island,” though it is apparently called Gossip Island by the State Park service. According to the locals, this is Lummi territory, and nearby Reid Harbor and the islands at the end of it had traditional uses before colonization. We looked at the trees on the island, many of which were very old, and imagined the trees seeing the island now as it had been for millennia before us.
Sunset at Haro Strait. Photo by Phil Jones.
The next wonderful day ended when Amber took me by foot down to Turn Point, passing some overlooks she had enjoyed since she was young. Though the day had become a bit cloudy, we were in luck: we got a good sunset over Canada beyond the water. As much as I’d heard of this body of water and land as an area of concern, it was good to sit and get to know it as what it really is: a beautiful corner of the Salish Sea and effectively Lands End for the San Juan islands and the lower 48 states.
