Vancouver's own account of the place is worth reading for its plainness. The island, he wrote, is principally composed of high rocky mountains and steep perpendicular cliffs, which in the centre of Strawberry Bay fall a little back, leaving low marshy ground between the foot of the mountains and the shore -- ground crossed by several small runs of most excellent water that reach the bay by oozing through the beach. That detail, fresh water seeping straight out of the sand, is why ships stopped here. It did not go entirely well: the Chatham, one of the vessels in his squadron, lost an anchor in Strawberry Bay. Somewhere under that water, an eighteenth-century anchor is presumably still where it fell.

Most of Cypress Island sits on ultramafic bedrock -- serpentinite and its relatives, rock formed deep in the earth's mantle and heaved to the surface. Soils derived from it are notoriously stingy, unbalanced in nutrients and heavy in magnesium, which is why the dominant soil series here is a very stony loam and why fertile ground is confined to small pockets and the island's northern end. Windblown volcanic ash and loess have dusted the island over millennia and improved matters slightly. Douglas fir still dominates the forest, with shore pine, Pacific madrone, and Douglas maple, and hemlock, red cedar, grand fir, alder, and bigleaf maple where conditions allow. But the plant that really thrives on magnesium-rich rock is seaside juniper, which grows here in unusual abundance. Vancouver, in other words, was not being careless. The island genuinely is covered in strange conifers -- just not the ones he named it for.

Long before any of this charting, the island belonged to the Samish, who kept a winter village on neighbouring Guemes Island and used Cypress for fishing. Samish fishing villages stood on Cypress until 1900. Then homesteaders arrived in the early twentieth century, and the villages did not survive the transition. That single sentence in the record covers a great deal: seasonal camps that had worked for centuries, salmon and reef-net grounds held by families, a way of using an island that left it looking untouched to people who mistook careful management for wilderness. The Samish remain in these waters. Their villages on Cypress do not.

In the 1980s a private landowner holding a substantial share of the island proposed to develop it -- first as a large-scale public utility project, then as a five-star resort with a golf course. On an island with no ferry, no public utilities, and a couple of dozen residents, this was an ambitious reading of the market. The small landowners organized themselves as the Friends of Cypress Island and fought both schemes, and in 1989 the developer sold his land to the Washington Department of Natural Resources instead. That purchase, plus later smaller acquisitions, built the Natural Area Preserve at the core of what is now the Cypress Island Natural Resources Conservation Area. In 2007 the surrounding waters were designated a DNR Aquatic Reserve as well. The island was saved, essentially, by the people who already lived on it not wanting a golf course.

The Department of Natural Resources manages most of Cypress and deliberately leaves it alone, maintaining trails but little else. A lake sits near the middle of the island; a salmon farm occupies a sheltered bay at the southeastern corner. No public ferry serves the island and there are no public utilities on it, which has done more to preserve its character than any designation. What it does have is water access: Eagle Harbor offers sheltered anchorage with state park facilities, and two campsites on the east side make Cypress a favourite for kayakers, who can reach it from the mainland in a single crossing. You paddle over Rosario Strait or Bellingham Channel, pull up on a beach, and walk into forest that has been left to get on with it.