Cama Beach
Winter hiking on Camano Island
Kris and I have been having a gay old time lately exploring the trails and beaches of Whidbey and Camano Islands, including a pretty special trip to Cama Beach yesterday. I’ll get to that in a second. I’ll also note that the current fixation with these two islands is partly driven by “work” on yet another guidebook. Hoofing down the trail isn’t exactly work, of course, though there is a certain amount of drudgery in the computer time needed to make sense of it all. I’ll post more on the book later after I figure out the cover, but it is getting close to finished!
Located on a very nice stretch of beach fronting Saratoga Passage, Cama Beach Historical State Park is famous for its dozens of cabins lining the shore, the prized artifacts of an old fishing resort. The site was threatened with redevelopment more than three decades ago. But thanks to the generosity of the Stradley family who owned and operated the resort, the place was happily saved from that fate to eventually become a brand new state park in 2008.
Unfortunately, the many fans of Cama Beach were recently jolted by Washington State Parks’ decision to close all the cabins, due to environmental issues and a long list of expensive repairs that may or may not be feasible to complete. Sewage disposal is a biggie.
After wandering through yesterday, my own gut says the cabins still look pretty stout, so why not install a couple of portable restrooms and warn folks they need to bring their own water? Generate some revenue while pondering solutions. Not all of us require the luxury of turning a tap or pressing the flusher. I think they call it rustic. That said, I won’t pretend to out-think the experts here, though one does wonder about such an abrupt and total closure.
On to the fun stuff. Kris was nice enough to drop me at the east end of the Cross Island Trail (it doesn’t actually cross the island), and meet me at the Welcome Center inside the main park entrance. From there we headed to Cranberry Lake where rafts of ducks and flocks of geese were dabbling and splashing away in this rather large beaver pond. A highlight was the bald eagle making a bombing run just above the startled necks of a some Canadian geese. They honked their objections to the eagle, which continued on, apparently finding no tasty goose eggs to steal.
We next ambled down to the beach and around the cabins, where several women had their spotting scopes trained on something in the water. Orca! Perhaps a mile offshore, we could see the spouts and dorsal fins of maybe a dozen whales, as a pod of transients (we later learned) slowly made their way south through Saratoga Passage.
It was the first time we’d seen killer whales since returning from the East Coast in 2019. We hadn’t exactly been looking for them, so it was a real treat when it happened so spontaneously. The nice lady at the Welcome Center said that grey whales had also been coming around lately and were feeding on ghost shrimp close to shore.
There is more than a mile of public beach here, so we walked the beautiful crescent coastline north of the cabins, passing seals, gulls, a squawking heron and a diving bald eagle that also appeared to come up empty handed. We passed only one other human walking a dog.
Before calling it a day, we moved on to nearby Camano Island State Park to see if we might still spot the orcas, but no dice. No complaints, however. The day before, we’d been at Fort Casey on Whidbey Island watching a flock of sea lions feeding and frolicking close to shore. Speaking of which, there’s a complete skeleton of a sea lion inside the Welcome Center at Cama Beach.
So, a fun couple of days for beaches and wildlife. Happily, we still have a few more beach walks to check out, especially on Whidbey Island, during these last uncrowded weeks of winter. By the way, if you happen to visit the many parks, preserves and/or beaches of Camano Island, the bakery and gift shop at Camano Commons is worth a stop.