Short days, swift tides, steady rain, and strong wind make kayaking in December a challenge. This time of year, I retire from the big waters in favor of shorter, more sheltered paddles.
Anderson Island in south Puget Sound is the perfect December destination. Tidal currents during the day are mild. The geography of the sound protects the kayaker from wind. The distance is only a little over three miles (5 km) from the boat ramp at Luhr to the campsite at Carlson Bay. If the tide is high, the kayaker can detour to the Nisqually River delta and penetrate deep within the marshes of the estuary.
A weather window opened during the middle of the week, and I made my move: two days of exploring Anderson Island and the surrounding waters.
Route map. At high tide, only a sliver of beach remained above the waterline next to the boat ramp.
Aquatic birds overwinter in Washington on both fresh and salt water. The estuaries around Puget Sound are particularly desirable habitat and attract thousands of birds. Hoping to find large flocks of waterfowl like those I had encountered in past Decembers on the Stillaguamish River delta, I turned east rather than north from the boat ramp to paddle the delta of the Nisqually River.
Unfortunately, December is also the middle of the duck-hunting season, and the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge is one of western Washington’s chief hunting grounds. Ducks were present throughout Nisqually in large numbers, especially American wigeon, but every time I approached closer than a hundred meters, they mistook me for one of their shotgun-toting tormenters and burst into the sky in great, panicked routs.
I took pity on the ducks and shifted focus to a less skittish family of bird: the shorebirds. Thanks to its vast, drying mudflats, the Nisqually River delta is a major overwintering ground for waders, especially dunlin. Sport hunting of most shorebird species in the United States was outlawed in 1927, so these birds were not as terrified of a human’s approach as the ducks had been.
Although the dunlin had nothing to fear from me, they had plenty to fear from their fellow birds. A peregrine falcon was working the estuary. Each time the falcon passed overhead, or even when they merely suspected the falcon might be lurking somewhere nearby, hundreds of dunlin would erupt into flight and execute crazy aerial maneuvers to disorient the predator.
The dunlin were far less frightened of me than they were of the falcon. In fact, they almost seemed to be using me as a deterrent against the falcon. Whenever they were especially alarmed, they would flash past my head with a whir of hundreds of wingbeats, seemingly in the hope that the falcon would be too afraid of me to follow them.
Much as I wanted to stay and serve as a human scarecrow for the dunlin, the tide was already dropping fast. Just a few inches beneath my hull, the landforms of the Nisqually delta began to appear as the ebbing salt water rushed back to the sea. I had to di di mau most ricky-tick to avoid being stranded on the mudflats that would soon emerge.
The campsite at Carlson Bay on Anderson Island was deserted. I set up camp at the end of the gravel bar that partially impounds the bay.
Kayaking past submerged willows in Nisqually River delta. At high tide, the seemingly boundless wetland lures the kayaker in, only to strand him when the tide abruptly drops to reveal the mudflats submerged beneath a couple feet of water.
Overlook, Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. Access to the overlook is closed during hunting season to avoid making things too easy for the hunters.
Dunlin flock, Nisqually delta. Even more oppressive than the peregrine falcon in the air is the peregrine falcon in the mind.
View of Carlson Bay, Anderson Island from kayak. The bay is in the small, dark notch between the bluffs.
Carlson Bay gravel spit. A floating wooden footbridge gives access to the upland areas of Anderson Island, including Andy’s Marine Park and Andy’s Wildlife Park, two of the main hiking routes on the island.
Carlson Bay camping area. Winds can be strong on the exposed spit, but luckily my weather window held for both days I was here.
Anderson Island was hopping with birds. Waterfowl gathered in the bays and estuaries, while songbirds filled the forests. On water and on land, the birds had assembled in large flocks, so all I had to do was follow the calls.
The forest birds were especially delightful. Several times, I encountered mixed feeding flocks, in which half a dozen species travelled as a single unit through the forest: red-breasted nuthatches, chestnut-backed and black-capped chickadees, both species of kinglet, brown creepers, and yellow-rumped warblers. Sometimes these mobile feeding flocks would overtake smaller, more stationary flocks of song and fox sparrows, spotted towhees, and the three year-round species of thrushes. Birds would pop in and out of view in all directions, leaving me spinning in circles trying to keep track.
Shortly after dawn, the pine siskins began their foraging flights. So large were these flocks that I could hear the rush of wind from their wings even from within my tent.
Female and first-winter hooded mergansers, Carlson Bay. All three merganser species were present in the vicinity of Carlson Bay.
Male hooded merganser, Carlson Bay. This species can raise and lower its hood at will, which creates an especially striking display when performed by an adult male.
Mallards in Andys Wildlife Park. Not far from this flock, I startled a Wilson’s snipe into flight.
Pacific wren, Andy’s Marine Park. This species has the strongest personality of our wrens.
Ruby-crowned kinglet, Carlson Bay. This species breeds in the mountains but descends to the lowlands in winter.
Golden-crowned kinglet, Andy’s Wildlife Park. Only about a quarter of the kinglets I saw were golden-crowned; the rest were ruby-crowned.
Brown creeper, Andy’s Wildlife Park. Treecreepers are mostly an Old World family, but the brown creeper is the sole North American member.
Chestnut-backed chickadee, Andy’s Marine Park. It is often the calls of this gregarious species that herald the approach of a wintertime mixed feeding flock.
Pine siskin flock, Carlson Bay. It can be hard to identify wintertime finches in flight, but siskins are more distinctive than most.
Most of the berries in the forest were long out of season by now, but there were still a few evergreen huckleberries in the bushes along the trails. I gathered handfuls to nourish me in my hiking, but they were past their prime and had lost most of their flavor.
Still coming into season were the berries of the Pacific madrones, also known as arbutus. The beaches were covered with fallen madrone berries at the high-tide line, so many I wondered where they had all come from. I soon learned. A large flock of robins and thrushes flew in to the treetops above the beach and begun plucking berries. In their haste, the birds fumbled many berries, which fell pattering through the canopy like oversized raindrops. At high tide, many of the berries landed in the water, where they bobbed until the wind-waves pushed them up onto the wrack line on the beach.
Douglas-fir roots growing down sandy cliff, Carlson Bay. Swallows and guillemots have excavated nesting burrows up and down the cliffs.
Orange ochre-bearing pebbly soils, Carlson Bay. Despite the abundance of ochre in Puget Sound, pictographs are all but unknown on Washington’s inland shores.
Pacific madrone berries on gravel beach, Carlson Bay. Robins and thrushes love these berries, but they don’t taste very nice to most people.
Pacific madrone berry cluster on branch. The bark, leaves, and berries of this tree are all lovely in their colors and textures.
Alex at sunset, Carlson Bay. I thought about sleeping out under the stars, but a chilly five-knot breeze persuaded me I’d be better off inside the tent.
Anderson Island is only a few miles across the water from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Lewis-McChord is one of America’s largest military bases, with a combined military and civilian population of over 200,000 people. It is home to two of the army’s thirty-one active-duty brigade combat teams, one of the army’s eleven active-duty combat aviation brigades, a national guard brigade combat team and support aviation battalion, two airlift wings flying a total of some fifty C-17 Globemasters, and a multitude of special forces units both ground and air. Helicopters of various types flew back and forth over Anderson Island all day, and there was a steady drumbeat of distant small-arms fire, including the distinctive three-round bursts from the army’s M-4 family of rifles.
Despite the constant martial noise from its neighbor, Anderson Island has one of the best-managed park districts in Puget Sound. Although the land base on the island is small, the district accommodates functions normally associated with much larger parks: conservation of tidelands, beaches, fresh- and saltwater wetlands, salmon-bearing streams, rare forest ecologies, camping and picnicking, interpretive trail signage, and archaeological preservation, all on just a few hundred acres.
The archaeological sites on Jacobs Point were new to me, as I had never hiked this far from Carlson Bay on any of my previous visits to Anderson Island. A chimney from the Jacobs family pioneer cabins still stands, rising lonely above the bush like some kind of forgotten Mayan ruin, shrouded in moss and ferns. The nineteenth-century brickworks on East Oro Bay has disappeared, but hundreds of broken and discarded bricks remain. Over the past century and a half, the bricks have accumulated into a shoreline midden overlain by soil and vegetation. The brick midden resembles the shell middens that mark the former habitation sites of the aboriginal population, except the bricks are red while the shells are white. I wonder what color the middens will be that someday will mark our own society’s habitation sites.
Foggy morning, Carlson Bay. Despite all the moisture in the air, there was no condensation on my tent or gear.
Alex reading at Carlson Bay. Only seven other people came down to the beach during the two days I spent here.
Russula mushrooms, Andy’s Wildlife Park. Twenty or more species of mushroom peeked through the moss and ferns on the forest floor.
Turkey tail mushrooms, Andy’s Wildlife Park. The alternative-medicine community has embraced this mushroom as a cure for cancer and any number of other ailments, but the data are ambiguous and contradictory as to whether there is any real effect.
Licorice ferns and moss growing on chimney of Jacobs family cabin. The elder Jacobs farmed here periodically for decades, in between jobs on the mainland.
Broken and discarded bricks from Anderson Island brickworks, ca. mid-1890s. Twigs and pebbles embedded in many of the bricks are evidence of perhaps less than meticulous workmanship.
MH-47G Chinook helicopter from 4th Battalion, 160th Special Operation Aviation Regiment flies over Anderson Island. The long, skinny protuberance from the starboard nose (left in this photo) is a mid-air refueling probe, while the short, fat protuberance from the port nose (right in this photo) is a terrain-following radar.
Steller sea lion, Nisqually Reach. The same record-breaking chum salmon run that attracted killer whales in November was still running in December, and dozens of sea lions were out in the south sound to take advantage.
Kayaking from Anderson Island to Nisqually. I pulled into the boat ramp a few minutes after sunset.
Anderson Island offers more than its small size seems to promise. Every time I go, whatever the time of year, I see something new and beautiful. There is no need for long expeditions on big water. A simple overnight paddle to this backyard of Nisqually delivers everything a kayaker could want.
—Alex Sidles