In 2023, Rachel and I took our kids, Maya and Leon, down the first half of the lower Skagit River, from Rockport to Sedro-Woolley. This summer, we went down the second half of the river, from Lyman to Mount Vernon.

We took the trip in three days, although the first day involved only a short hop from the launch point on North Lyman Ferry Road to an island outside Minkler, just four miles (6 km) downriver. We had hoped to land on the same island where we camped the final night of our 2023 trip, but the braided channels around Minkler were so confusing we never found the right island.

For our final night of this trip, we camped on an island outside Burlington. It was the last of the sandy, gravelly islands before the river became a single, wide channel as it approached its delta.

We had originally planned to continue one more day downriver to take out at Conway. In the end, Maya decided she would rather get home a day early. so we took out at Mount Vernon, having travelled twenty-five miles (40 km) from Lyman.

Between Lyman and Burlington, countless islands lie in the middle of the Skagit River. They aren’t much to look at: just bars of sand and gravel, sometimes with a stand of cottonwoods in the middle. Such fragile islands exist at the mercy of the river. The Skagit River has been dammed for over a century, but it still produces significant floods two or three times each decade. Low-lying sandy islands stand no chance against a flood, so the islands get re-arranged every few years.

My GPS unit was loaded with topographic maps published in 2008, so it was almost useless for navigating the river of today. Entire river channels had disappeared and reformed along new paths during the intervening years. Even aerial imagery from Google was of questionable reliability. At one point, I found myself standing on a wide, gravelly beach, but according to Google’s imagery, I was floating in the middle of the river.

The ownership of such transient landforms is just as dubious as the mapping of them. Ownership of the Skagit River islands is, in theory, divided among the US Forest Service, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and Department of Fish and Wildlife, and a handful of private owners, including the Skagit Land Trust. In practice, the constant accretion and avulsion of the river makes it all but impossible to determine the ownership of any particular parcel. The Skagit County assessor’s map shows, on the one hand, dozens of parcels in the river that do not correspond to any island in existence today, and on the other hand, dozens of islands in existence today that have no recorded owner.

We avoided any posted islands, camped only on the most secluded beaches, and never encountered any trouble. On the contrary, motorists on the highway would honk their horns and yell, “Woo-hoo” out their windows when they saw our kayaks cruising down the river. To insulate ourselves against such boisterous hospitality at night, we camped out of sight and sound of the highways.

Deer and elk tracks were more abundant on the islands than human tracks were. Hunting is popular throughout Skagit County, so the animals themselves were elusive. The only elk we saw were a family of two adults and two juveniles which I spotted wading between two islands early one morning. Leon spotted our one and only deer of the trip, poking along a gravel beach as we shot past down a rapid. As soon as the deer saw us, it went stotting off into the cottonwood shrubs.

Shortly before sunset one evening, Rachel and I were sitting in camp joking about something or other, when she said, “There’s a bear, a black bear.” I thought at first this was part of the joke, but when I looked behind me, sure enough, there was a bear on the far side of the river. It was missing one of its front paws, perhaps the result of a car collision or possibly even a trap. We called the kids from their games on the beach so they could see their first-ever wild bear.

There were almost no waterfowl on the river. In three days on the water, we saw only a few flocks of Canada geese and a single common merganser.

Land birds offered a happier story. Swallows were the most abundant family of birds, with appearances by tree, violet-green, barn, cliff, and northern rough-winged swallows. On the stretches of river with the most islands and highest sandbanks, we even saw bank swallows, a rarity in western Washington.

Turkey vultures were everywhere. Some sort of large, dead fish had washed ashore on our camping island near Burlington, and it attracted vultures for days. At one point, a dozen vultures were picking at the carcass, while eight more vultures circled overhead. A bald eagle swooped in, scattered the vultures, and made off with the fish carcass, but there were enough bits left over that a few vultures were still pecking around the following morning.

West of Burlington, the river widened and began making S-turns, signs of its approach to its delta. Surprisingly, the current did not slow appreciably even in these lower reaches. Rapids ceased to be a factor west of Burlington, but the main stem of the river continued flowing at about two knots, sometimes more. Even at our leisurely paddling pace, it took only a few hours to reach Mount Vernon.

Kayaking the Skagit River means never having to hurry. The current was fast enough we could get anywhere we wanted to go with scarcely any effort. Distances between campsites were short enough that paddling faster would have added nothing but work. The right way to enjoy this river is the way we did it—drifting along from island to island, watching the wildlife and enjoying one another’s company.

—Alex