Out to San Juan Island

(For something that isn’t work, for once)

The ferries out to San Juan Island are expensive enough it’s hard to go on a whim, but since I had a friend from far away wanting to go there I had an excuse. Ostensibly I was just acting as free lodging for a ski trip, but bad ski conditions earlier in his trip enabled this outing. (Work will occasionally take me to Friday Harbor on a ferry, but almost never with excuse to leave town.)

Weather was forecast to not be that good for running around the island either, but it turned out to be as good as we could ask for in late winter. It did start out cloudy, but there was subtle beauty in the sky on the outbound sailing.

I tried and failed to sketch this, as it is too hard to balance detail around the sun with the hard contrast of the clouds and what I believe to be Mount Erie below. (This picture even blows out Mount Erie, but is still a testament to how well cameras can handle such a difficult dynamic range.)

Due to bad time management (mainly from not packing a proper lunch), we only really covered Horse Point/American Camp and Lime Kiln. Others have expressed interest in heading out to San Juan Island with me in a month or two, so I may eventually be able to get to British Camp and other points up north.

The lighthouse at Lime Kiln may be modest by lighthouse standards, but that makes framing it in pictures that much easier. (Though, I did wind up getting a couple strangers in my best shot.)

The water clarity on the west side of the island made quite the spectacle too.

The cliffs near American Camp feel like what I currently imagine Scotland is like. We’ll see if that holds true or not in a few months. Around here I got the most memorable bit of dialog on the whole trip from passerby: “You must be from Canada: You’re not wearing a coat!”

I’m not as legendarily cold tolerant as I was in my childhood and teens, but I still want to take that in stride. These days it’s possible for me to get too cold, but working up a sweat counters that. In my teens I could eat ice cream outside during a harsh winter night, and as a child I actively sought out cold ocean water year round.

Mount Baker (at least I believe it’s Mount Baker, another tourist kept insisting it was Whistler) made itself a prominent star. This was on the outbound sailing…

This was near Horse Point…

and on the return sailing, timing was just a little off to get it all aglow… (In glowing conditions the camera also had trouble focusing, so I effectively missed certain angles in addition to the timing being a bit off.)

What is probably the picture of the whole trip was a crack shot of another ferry during the “Return to Vehicle” message on the return sailing. In many ways, it’s a good picture to end this post on.