Whidbey Island - for Travel

The rain held off on our drive north from Seattle, including the short ferry ride from Mukilteo to Clinton on the southern tip of Whidbey Island.
It was the start of a three-generation family weekend. Keara was fourteen months old. Anthony was four and a half. Nancy and I are their grandparents, and in between are our daughter, Meredith, and her husband, Larry.
We tried to find a getaway with something for everyone, one that had a different feel than Seattle, where the two younger generations live, but was not so far away that the kids would get antsy. Whidbey was perfect, and the ferry was an ideal break in the drive for Keara, who, having just learned to walk, didn’t much like the restraints of the car seat.
Since check-in wasn’t till four, we stopped just west of Coupeville, at Fort Casey, which used to safeguard the narrows leading from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Admiralty Inlet, and on this day was host to a kite-flying festival that spread across the lush and rolling lawns. Anthony loved clambering up and down the concrete ramparts and Larry looked, fascinated, down the rifled barrels of the ten-inch “disappearing” guns, which retreated behind their parapets after firing, and were state-of-the-artillery at the start of the First World War.
With the loudspeakers incongruously blaring “Mambo Italiano,” which accompanied the kite choreography in the sky above us, we walked a grassy path to the rocky beach, littered with huge driftwood logs. For a while the kids tossed rocks into the water and built little forts out of sticks, while the adults watched the Keystone ferry heading for Port Townsend, guillemots fishing just offshore and nine black oystercatchers preening on the tidepool rocks up the beach. We gazed across the misty strait to the stormclouds that obscured the Olympic Range, across the way. They were heading straight for us.
The rain caught us just as we scrambled up the bluff. Larry scooped up Keara, and Anthony (with Meredith in pursuit) ran ahead, pointing and shouting “To the Lighthouse! To the Lighthouse!”
Admiralty Head Lighthouse, which has a gemlike proportion and offers (even in the rain) a dramatic prospect of the waters, their forested islands and the Olympic Peninsula. After a view from the top, we spent the next rainy half hour in the museum. We learned that the first lighthouse there was built in 1858 and the present one dates from the 1890s, when the fort was established. By the end of World War I, air power and improved naval gunnery made the fort obsolete as a guardian of the ports and shipyards of Puget Sound; the lighthouse, too, lost its utility by the ‘20s. After the Army used Fort Casey as a training center during the Second World War, it was turned into a state park in 1956, lighthouse and all.
The kids, meanwhile, were enthralled by a “please touch” collection of barnacles, limpets, clam and cockle shells, worm tubes and other seaborne artifacts (which they had ignored on the beaches down below).
When the stormclouds passed, we drove across the “prairies” of the Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve in central Whidbey Island, which the National Park Service has preserved from development, and remain working farms. After stopping at the Coupeville food market for some groceries, we drove along Madrona Way, a road that curls around the Puget Sound inlet of Penn Cove to our weekend hideaway, the Captain Whidbey Inn.
The Inn’s main building was crafted from madrona logs in 1907, and is crammed with period antiques. Our more modern and roomy cottage faced out onto a small lagoon that connects to the cove.
Once we brought in the bags, we took drinks onto the deck and noticed a great blue heron poised in the shallows of the opposite shore, about a hundred yards away. Nice. We commented on the touch of nature among the cottages, in view of the road.
Just then Nancy noticed a splash, and a split second later a bald eagle was sitting on a raft in the middle of the lagoon, with a large fish in its mouth.
A few moments later, Meredith pointed to a rippling in the water at our end of the lagoon, just fifteen yards from the deck. Two black heads popped out, then backs and tails. A third one. Three otters were chasing each other through the shallows, oblivious to us and to the nearby eagle. Anthony, who had watched otters frolic at the zoo, loved it.
At that point, the eagle took off, circled the lagoon, and landed on the bare branch of a pine that formed part of the forest fringe between the water and the road. It began to eat its fish. And the otters jumped up onto the raft the eagle had vacated, chased each other around it for a few moments, dived back into the water and vanished from our sightlines.
Welcome to Whidbey Island.
The weekender on Whidbey is like one of the blind men trying to describe an elephant, because the island is so long (forty-seven road miles from the Clinton ferry terminal in the south to the Deception Pass bridge at the northern tip), large (the second-largest in the forty-eight states) and varied in its landscape, development and even its annual rainfall. Coupeville gets ten inches a year less than island communities north and south of it because it is in the “rain shadow” of the Olympic range, which cuts off some wet clouds. Despite the better odds, rain was a dominent element in our Coupeville weekend. Although it changed our schedule, it failed to dampen our enthusiasm for the place.
Even in rain, there was plenty to do for both adults and children, with good choices of food and lodging, wooded areas girded by water, and small towns that preserved the feel of the mid-nineteenth century, but remained living communities, beyond their tourism.
On our weekend there, in addition to the local kite festival, the Coupville High parking lot was jampacked for commencement, the Naval air station near Oak Harbor filled the sky with training flights (many of them, apparently, Prowlers), tractors rumbled through the fecund fields (which still hold the state record for highest wheat yield per acre) and workers harvested topnotch oysters and mussels from the aquaculture rafts anchored in Penn Cove.
On our first morning, the Great Blue Heron was still fishing, this time joined by a kingfisher which, perched on the pine branch the eagle had occupied the night before, periodically dove into the center of the lagoon and then flew off with its fish into the woods on the other side, most likely to feed its brood. We didn’t see the bald eagle or the otters again, although a woman tending the Coupeville museum told us both species were ubiquitous around Penn Cove.
The rain let up enough for us to drive to and walk through a 140-acre reserve of wild rhododendrons (early June is the peak season) maintained by the state’s Department of Natural Resources off Patmore Road, just south of Coupeville. It’s a good place to picnic or camp, but be watchful - the turnoff from Patmore is a poorly marked gravel road.
In addition to Fort Casey, there are two other sites along the beaches and bluffs of Admiralty Inlet, on the opposite side of the island from Penn Cove and Coupeville, which offer good views, walks suitable for kids and grandparents alike, and elements of historic interest. They are Ebey’s Landing and Fort Ebey State Park, both named for one of the island’s first settlers, Isaac Ebey, who arrived in 1851 and was shot to death six years later by raiding Haida indians from the Princess Charlotte Islands who were seeking revenge for the murder of one of their chiefs.
Since the rain was intermittent, we drove along Libby Road to Fort Ebey State Park and pulled into the first parking site we reached, right at beachside. From there, we took a one-mile hike, through thick woods that covered us, which led up the two-hundred-foot-high bluffs, parallel to the beach, with periodic views out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The beach roses and blackberries attracted hummingbirds that hovered next to the flowers, just a few feet from us. But we also had to keep watch underfoot for six-inch-long black or green “banana slugs” that meander across the trails. These provoked repeated exclamations of gleeful disgust from Anthony, while Keara stared at them, wide-eyed.
At the end of the trail is Fort Ebey, another cluster of concrete bunkers that once housed coastal artillery. There we found a bridal party posing for a group photo, with the black-gowned judge aiming her camera, and waiting for the sky to lighten. From the fort, we had a choice of returning to the car along the gravelled beach (when the tide is not full), on the parallel auto road or back along the footpath atop the bluff.
When the rain grew steadier, we drove into Coupeville past one of the old blockhouses built by the first settlers in the 1850s to protect themselves against feared (but never carried out) uprisings by the local Skagit indians.
The town still has a working waterfront and wharf and victorian sea captains’ houses, including (on Grange Street at the waterfront) the original home of Captain Thomas Coupe, the town’s founder.
Many of the old houses are now B&Bs, some of which welcome children, and others that exclude them. At 11 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays in season (May to September), there is a ninety-minute tour of the historic buildings, which starts from the Island County Historial Society Museum, on Alexander and Front Streets.
It was the museum to which we headed for our last stop of the day, when the rain intensified. There we watched an eighteen-minute video that told of the local struggle to limit development and preserve Penn Cove, Coupeville and its outlying farmlands, woodlands and natural prairies. It was achieved in 1978 through the creation of the country’s first National Historical Preserve, with federal funds to purchase land development rights from current owners. We also learned about the murder of Isaac Ebey and Captain Coupe’s 1852 claim of three hundred acres along Penn Cove.
The sun finally emerged during our third day on Whidbey. After breakfast, we walked down to the shingle beach on Penn Cove, waving off the ketch “Cutty Sark,” which is based at our inn, as she cast off from the floating dock for a week-long cruise of the San Juan Islands. The folks on deck waved back.
We left Coupeville and drove across the prairie on Ebey Road to Ebey’s Landing, parking in a small dirt lot right at the beach.
From there, a trail leads northward, sharply uphill along the hedgerow of a farm field, with wildflowers galore between us and the edge of the bluff. Then the trail follows the bluff for about a mile, with a stand of large Douglas Fir on the inland side, offering occasional shade. (There is enough rough between the trail and the bluff so that the kids, if watched, were in no imminent danger of toppling over.) Now that the clouds had cleared, we had dramatic views of the snow-capped Olympic range across the strait. There is a sharp descent from the bluff at the far end of Perego’s Lake, a brackish body of water that hosts a wide range of shorebirds. We had the choice of returning along the beach, along the lake shore path just over the primary dune from the beach, or back along the high bluff. We chose the last route, and found an immature bald eagle roosting on one of the crags beside the trail. It ignored our approach a long time, then flew off across the farm fields when we got within ten feet.
Our final stop was Deception Pass, about nineteen miles north of Coupeville, where a handsome bridge, built in 1935 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, connects Whidbey to Fidalgo Island and thence to the mainland, about a two-hour drive south to Seattle.
The pass was named Deception in 1792 when British Captain George Vancouver, charting the Pacific Northwest, assumed what is now Whidbey Island to be part of the mainland, until his ship’s master, Joseph Whidbey, undeceived him by going through the pass and around the island in a small boat.
The 4,128-acre state park there is the busiest in Washington, offering swimming and trout-fishing in a fresh-water lake, salt-water boating and kayaking, 246 campsites and miles of biking and hiking trails on both sides of the bridge.
We took one of those trails, walking under the bridge, and through a sweetly-scented stand of Douglas Fir, out to forested cliffs with breathtaking views of the Olympics, Mount Baker and the Cascades. Beyond us were the San Juan Islands and Victoria, on Vancouver Island, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
For Anthony, who is fascinated by all things automotive, the most exciting part was the realization that a stream of cars and trucks was riding right above his head. He heard the loud bumping, and felt the girders vibrate. Keara, meanwhile, discovered a centipede making its way across the needles beside the trail. With her mother’s guidance (“Make nice to the centipede”) she squatted down and gently stroked its back. Then she stood up and before we could react, reached out one small foot and stomped it. Anthony laughed, as the adults cringed, groaned and hid their involuntary smiles. The centipede, unmoving, was not amused.
Finally, we walked out onto the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, looking out towards the San Juans. Below us we spotted the two-masted Cutty Sark, which we had seen off from Penn Cove earlier that morning, motoring through the narrow pass. Anthony waved, but we were too high up for the voyagers to see us.
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IF YOU GO...
Getting there - Driving from off-island is your best bet. Ferry information is available at 800-843-3779. In season, the boats leave every half hour from Mukilteo and Clinton and cost about $8 each way (cash only) for two adults and a child. The ride takes 20 minutes. The ferry from Port Townsend (a Victorian town on the Olympic Peninsula) to Keystone takes half an hour and leaves every 45 minutes. We drove right onto the first ferry at Mukilteo. Lines can be longer on mid-summer weekends, but you can leave your car and promenade enjoyably around any of the ports.
Harbor Air (800-359-3220) flies from SeaTac to Oak Harbor, where there is a Budget car rental office. Overnight boat moorings are available at Oak Harbor, Coupeville, and Cornet Bay (near Deception Pass). Evergreen Trailways bus service from Seattle to Whidbey is sporadic and inconvenient. Island Transit (360-678-7771) bus service on the island exists only along the main highway, Routes 525 and 20, but it is free.
Places to Stay - In addition to the Captain Whidbey Inn (800-366-4097), where rooms for two start at $85, the B&Bs in the Coupeville area include the Inn at Penn Cove (800-688-2683), and the Coupeville Inn (800-247-6162), which we’ve stayed in or looked in on during previous visits. For a change of pace and place, the Fort Casey Inn (360-678-8792), at the state park, consists of several buildings built in 1909 as officers’ quarters, which offer two-bedroom units with kitchen and sitting room. Prices in the area range from $75 for two to $150 for a larger space.
Places to Eat - We ate dinners in our cottage on this trip (including good pizza from Louie-G’s, at 11 Northwest Coveland Street), but the Captain Whidbey Inn offers dinners. In town, some options are the Captain’s Galley at 10 Front Street, which (on a previous visit) offered good views of Penn Cove and mussels from it, Christopher’s, at 23 Front Street or Rosi’s Garden at 606 North Main Street.
Shopping - There are art and antique galleries and shops in Coupeville and in Langley, an ultra-quaint boutique and B&B town just eight miles beyond the Clinton ferry landing. The best local craft shopping may be at the Greenbank Farm, on the highway 10 miles south of Coupeville, which bottles and sells loganberry wine, and offers samples. For groceries, there are two huge supermarkets in Oak Harbor, the island’s largest town, 10 miles north of Coupeville.
Although Oak Harbor also has places to stay and restaurants, it serves as the suburban center for Naval Air Station personnel, with franchise fast-food outlets, shopping malls and a year-round population of about 21,000. Thus it lacks the small-town feel of Coupeville (1,600 plus eagles and otters).