Washington State has many public lands that have no designated campsite, no official status, no parking lot, no roads or trails, and no “welcome aboard” website, yet primitive camping is nonetheless allowed. Those intrepid enough to forgo the comforts of picnic tables and outhouses can find some beautiful and unusual places to camp in this state.
For this weekend’s adventure, I headed out to Goat Island in Skagit Bay, not far from Deception Pass. In fact, I camped at Quarry Pond in Deception Pass State Park to get an early start. Deception Pass is one of the most beautiful parts of the state, so I made sure to stop and walk across and under the bridge.
Rushing ebb at Deception Pass. Kayaks shoot through here like rocketships.
Goat Island is a geographically prominent but often-overlooked landmark in Skagit Bay, just north of the Skagit River delta. The island’s main claim to fame is the ruins of Fort Whitman, an Endicott Period fort built in 1911 to help defend Puget Sound from hostile fleets. In its heyday, the fort mounted four six-inch guns on disappearing carriages, backed up by a network of electrically fired underwater mines.
Today, all that’s left are the silent, abandoned concrete emplacements, covered in moss and ferns and slowing losing their identify to the encroaching forest. The island belongs to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, who seem content to let the old fort moulder. I set up camp in a grassy meadow atop the westernmost point of the island and spent the weekend exploring.
Route map. Note the enormous mud flats surrounding Goat Island and nearby Ika Island. Avoid at low tide, or keep to the dredged channel in blue.
I launched at the beautiful boat ramp in La Conner. The ebb tide carried me swiftly but gently past the old warehouses and new retirement homes that lined Swinomish Channel.
The bridge at La Conner on a typical gray Washington day.
Double-crested cormorant in breeding plumage. These birds had moved from their winter freshwater roosting sites out to the coast to breed,
Male and female buffleheads, Swinhomish Channel. They were already beginning to pair off for the breeding season.
The western tip of Goat Island is by far the nicest spot for camping. The beach here disappears at high tide, so it is necessary to lift the boat up the rocks.
One of the four gun emplacements, ruins of an ancient and warlike civilization.
Passageway at Fort Whitman, Goat Island. The rooms inside the fort were surprisingly clean and dry for not having been maintained for seventy years.
How important Fort Whitman must have seemed to the soldiers manning it, and how irrelevant it has since become. A century ago, protecting the industrial shipyards in the south sound was a matter of national survival; an enemy fleet could have appeared and started shooting almost without notice; and this fort represented the most cutting-edge ship-fighting technology in the world.
Today, the shipyards have been eclipsed in importance by Amazon and Microsoft; there is no enemy fleet to speak of; and the fort is so hopelessly obsolete that it’s not even worth the government’s time to scrape the moss off it.
What would the old garrison say if they knew how things turned out? Would they be relieved that the world has changed so much that blasting enemy ships in Skagit Bay is outside the range of possibilities for which we must prepare? Would they be resentful of the years they spent huddling over guns whose purpose we have so thoroughly outgrown? Battling the onrushing enemy fleet seems a more ennobling way of life than writing code to help companies sell more junk. Would the garrison miss the old days if they saw us now?
Sitting on steps at Fort Whitman six-inch gun emplacement. Slowly but relentlessly, nature is reasserting its sovereignty over Goat Island.
Descending from roof of Fort Whitman. On the roof of the fort, I was delighted to find a hummingbird nesting in a Douglas-fir that was growing right out of the concrete.
View from inside Fort Whitman. It would certainly be possible to sleep inside the fort, but I’d worry about the ghost of some long-departed first sergeant still haunting his old battery.
It drizzled off and on throughout the weekend, at one point catching me down on the north beach with no coat. I hunkered down on the dry, flat gravel patch beneath a Douglas-fir, watching raindrops hit the gray, foggy bay. In front of the beach was a log boom tied off to the crusty old pilings left over from the fort’s former wharf. Mew gulls and oystercatchers called in the distance. I was alone with the driftwood and moss. This is how to live in the Pacific Northwest.
Goat Island was connected to the mainland by a mile-long rock jetty. I’d heard there was a hole in the wall to allow fish and boats to slip through without having to go the long way around Goat Island.
Luckily, a pair of fishermen told me exactly where to look for the hole, because it was not easy to spot from the water. On my way back to the car, I stuck my nose in to the hole, only to encounter a solid wall of driftwood. That’s what you get when you try to channel a big volume of water through a narrow hole in a country where the trees grow two feet a year! Kayakers hoping to transit the jetty will have to wait for someone with heavy equipment to come clear the way.
The current flows fast through Swinomish Channel. I waited till the afternoon flood to depart.
Washington State is full of little hidden treasures like this one. I sometimes use the Washington State public lands inventory map to find secret little spots to call my own for a few days, and Goat Island was one of the best, a perfect balance of modern human activity, natural beauty, wildlife, and history.
Unlike most Endicott Period forts, which are state parks, Goat Island is Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife land. At the time of this trip, WDFW had not imposed a camping prohibition on Goat Island. Sadly, in 2024, WDFW’s new management plan introduced a camping prohibition.
—Alex Sidles