Qualla: Cypress Island

Cypress Island: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit gordon hunter from Nanaimo, BC, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. There are no cypress trees on Cypress Island. In early June 1792, Captain George Vancouver sailed into a bay on its western shore, looked at the twisted evergreens along the shoreline, decided they were cypress, and wrote the name onto a chart that everyone has used ever since. They are junipers. He had already been beaten to the naming anyway -- the Spanish expedition under Jose Maria Narvaez had passed the year before and called it San Vincente -- but Vancouver's charts were the ones the Americans inherited, so the mistake stuck. Two centuries later the island remains largely as he found it: steep, forested, almost entirely undeveloped, with about forty people living on it and no ferry to get there.

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Image: gordon hunter from Nanaimo, BC, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cypress Island: A Bay, an Anchor, and Excellent Water

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 t...

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Image: Joe Mabel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cypress Island: Rock That Resists a Forest

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit brewbooks from near Seattle, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 seri...

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Image: brewbooks from near Seattle, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cypress Island: The Samish Villages

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Farwestern assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. 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 villag...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Farwestern assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Cypress Island: The Resort That Never Got Built

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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, thi...

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Image: Joe Mabel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cypress Island: Getting There Is the Point

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pfly, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 th...

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Image: Pfly | CC BY-SA 3.0