Labor Day weekend is the last call for summer in most of the United States. Half the population hits the road for one last hurrah in the outdoors. Finding a campsite can be almost impossible. Every site that can be reserved has been reserved months in advance. The drop-in sites have all been dropped in upon.

To find solitude during this busiest of weekends takes a dash of cleverness. Most of the traveling public is unaware, but Washington State is speckled with obscure little parcels of public land, many of which allow camping but do not advertise that fact. One such speckle lies at the north end of Hood Canal, in an annex to Shine Tidelands State Park known as the “Wolfe Property.” At the northern end of the property, accessible only via boat or a muddy slog, a campsite reserved just for kayakers is hidden at the end of a brushy trail.

The Wolfe Property campsite is so obscure it does not appear on State Parks’ own website. On the contrary, the website for Shine Tidelands State Parks affirmatively states that the park is “day use only.” The only clue on the internet that a campsite exists at the Wolfe Property is on the Washington Water Trails Association website, but even there the evidence is faint and ambiguous: some of the WWTA online maps show the campsite, while others do not.

My wife, Rachel, was out of town, so Grandpa John and I took my two kids, Maya and Leon. The paddle around Hood Head was surprisingly sporting against a ten-knot crosswind and an adverse flood current. Grandpa John and I each shipped a few pints of water in our open-cockpit folding kayaks. Poor Leon took a huge splash of seawater to the face while he was taking a nap, suffering the rudest awakening possible.

The Wolfe Property surrounds a bay that dries to a mudflat at low tide. For most visitors, the chief attraction is the opportunity to harvest shellfish. For us, the chief attraction was the sandy tombolo connecting the mainland to Hood Head. The kids wandered up and down the beach, collecting shells and digging holes, hoping, in four-year-old Leon’s words, to find “clay and water underground.”

It was good that the beach was so pleasant, because the campsite at Wolfe Property was rather dismal. It was a small clearing hacked out from the salmonberry and alders, with no view of the water and nowhere to explore except back to the beach. The site was in a state of decay, with the kayak rack partially collapsed and the interpretive sign wholly collapsed. Mercifully, the outhouse was still in fair condition, evidence that State Parks has not wholly abandoned this obscure little campsite.

State Parks may still remember the Wolfe Property, but almost no one else does. Even on this Labor Day weekend, only one other party walked past us on the beach the entire weekend, and no one visited the campsite in the woods. At the launch beach, one local resident of Hood Head muttered, “At least someone is using it” when I told him our destination.

The public’s loss was our gain. On the busiest outdoor weekend of the year, we had the place to ourselves. Grandpa John took advantage of the solitude to sleep out under the stars on the beach.

The fall shorebird migration was in full swing. The adult shorebirds had already passed through Washington earlier in the summer, but now the juveniles were here. The sandspit between the mainland and Hood Head attracted a few hundred least sandpipers in loose flocks up and down the beach. A few small flocks of western sandpipers also dropped in to visit. Only the sandy side of the spit seemed to attract shorebirds, not the muddy side.

Out on the water, common loons were hooting back and forth. Loud as they were, the loons’ hoots did not compare to the hooting of the barred owls in the forest at night. Half a dozen owls sang to one another for half the night, audible even to Grandpa John out on the spit.

Paddling back to the launch beach on Sunday, I was surprised to see a dragon on Hanson Point, the easternmost point of Hood Head. Decades ago, some unknown artist fashioned a seventy-five-foot-long sea monster out of driftwood and prayer flags. The community has maintained the sculpture ever since, rebuilding it each spring. After all these years, the dragon has become such a landmark that one family we met at the launch beach was going kayaking just to visit the dragon.

Our family had failed to notice the dragon during the previous day’s paddle around Hood Head. From our angle southeast of Hanson Point, it had just looked like flags flapping on a random driftwood structure. On the return paddle, seeing it from the north, the beast was unmistakable.

Around the east end of Hood Head, I was exasperated to discover what I took to be a fish farm: a network of buoys and lines attached to a floathouse headquarters. A net-pen fish farm! Washington State is supposed to be phasing these out! On closer inspection, however, this fish farm was lacking several of the features that make net pens so odious: no generator, no fish-feeding infrastructure, no overhead protection from birds, no permanent personnel. This appeared to be the least obtrusive fish farm I’d ever seen.

Grandpa John speculated that it was actually a seaweed farm. I was skeptical. Could there really be that much money in seaweed farming? And why even have a floathouse at all for a crop as passive as seaweed? I argued that it must be a shellfish farm.

It turns out we were both right. The mysterious facility was actually the Blue Dot Sea Farm, a combination seaweed-and-shellfish aquacultural project. The idea is that seaweed raises the pH of ocean water, which contributes to the growth of shellfish in water that would otherwise be too acidic. At the end of the growth cycle, the seaweed and the shellfish can both be harvested for a profit—or so Blue Dot hopes.