Deception Pass marks 100 years

DECEPTION PASS STATE PARK — High chair affixed to a picnic table, my daughter ate bite-size portions of shrimp scampi cooked over a portable stove before my wife and I tucked her into a travel crib zipped inside a tent in the Cranberry Lake Campground. On her first night camping, crashing waves and tree-rustling wind generated white noise better than any baby gadget.

The next day, we hiked out to Rosario Head, passing a picnic shelter where four years prior my wife’s family and mine met for the first time days before our wedding. Together they broke bread — or cracked claws — at a seafood boil. This solid stone structure, with windows framing the captivating blue waters beyond Rosario Beach, embodied the Pacific Northwest landscape that we wanted to convey to our families, who were visiting the region for the first time.

We are far from the first and certainly will not be the last Washingtonians drawn to Deception Pass. On 3,854 acres just 90 minutes from Seattle, this park is a highlight reel: mesmerizing saltwater passages spanned by an engineering marvel, tranquil freshwater lakes and ponds for swimming and fishing, craggy headlands with panoramic views, long stretches of beach, ephemeral tide pools and lush old-growth stands.

This year marks 100 since Washington State Parks turned the old military reserve, long the traditional land of the Samish and Swinomish tribes, into a state park. On July 23, the park and its foundation held a community picnic at East Cranberry Lake, the same place the park designation was celebrated in 1922. Deception Pass has been Washington’s most popular state park ever since, with visitor numbers today that rival the country’s most popular national parks and create management challenges for the lean staff.

A century breeds longstanding connections to this sliver of land and water where Fidalgo and Whidbey islands meet.

“We get families who come every single summer on the exact same weekend,” said the park’s Kirkland-born interpretive specialist, Joy Kacoroski, who camped at the park with her family as a child. “We’ve watched junior rangers become young adults. Visitors pull out photos of them standing under the bridge when they were a kid and now they’re 70 years old.”

Those multigenerational stories are familiar to retired park manager Jack Hartt, who grew up in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood and vividly recalls the Coleman lantern, canvas tent and crackling fire on his first camping trip to Bowman Bay, at age 4.

“These are the memories that millions of people have and the same people have dreams about when they can get back up here again,” Hartt said.

Reflecting on the park’s centennial, he was blunt about the park stewards’ role as preservationists: “What we have is what we don’t want to change. One hundred years from now, I want people to see the same thing.”

From pioneers to premier park

Deception Pass had a rich Euro American history even before it was folded into the nascent State Parks system. Western Union draped a telegraph line across the Salish Sea to Victoria via Fidalgo Island in the 1860s. Homesteaders and loggers nibbled away at the original landscape — the military can be thanked for today’s preserved old-growth — while Bowman Bay’s namesake, Dunnell Bowman, printed a socialist newspaper.

By the early 1900s, steamers from Seattle offered city folk a beach day at Rosario. At the future park’s east end, incarcerated people toiled in a quarry at a state prison camp. On a small island in Skagit Bay, Scottish immigrant Ben Ure operated a saloon, dance hall and smuggling operation — rum, opium, woolens and human trafficking of Pacific Islanders — while his Indigenous wife kept watch from neighboring Strawberry Island for Coast Guard cutters.

In the 1930s, Deception Pass evolved into the park we recognize today. For that, thank the federal government. The National Park Service lent its expertise, as the Great Depression had decimated the state parks system’s budget, and the NPS briefly considered designating Deception Pass as a national park.

To execute the park plan, the Civilian Conservation Corps deployed thousands of young men who built graceful stone picnic shelters and bathhouses, swimming beaches, campgrounds, trails, roads and water and sewer lines. They also lent their manpower to the Deception Pass Bridge, which opened in 1935 over the protests of Berte Olson, Puget Sound’s first female ferryboat captain, who held rights to the route.

The end result was so majestic that, to this day, casual visitors mistakenly assume they are in a national park.

“This (park) has to be managed and done right,” Hartt, who has written two books about the park, said of the attitude toward improving the park at the time. “All these structures are built like they fit in.”

Popularity contest

In 1924, Deception Pass State Park welcomed 26,000 people, making it the most visited Washington state park. Over 100 years, it has rarely relinquished that title, especially once the bridge and a newly paved road on Highway 20 put the park in easy reach of the mainland. In 2021, the park’s estimated 3.2 million to 3.5 million visitors rivaled the attendance totals of the 10 most visited national parks.

“It’s fun to be popular, but sometimes people do things that can be damaging to the park,” Hartt said. “Always in the back of our mind, we are protecting the people that are here, and protecting the resources from those people.”