The Oregon Treaty, concluded on June 15, 1846, ran the boundary between British and American territory west along the 49th parallel to the Pacific. Drawn on a map, the line looked clean. On the ground it sliced across the Tsawwassen peninsula and left its southern tip attached to nothing American at all. When British negotiators understood the problem, Captain James Prevost was instructed to ask that the fragment be ceded back. It wasn't. Point Roberts stayed in the United States, reachable from the rest of Washington only by a twenty-five mile drive through Canada, by boat, or by small aircraft. Lily Point claims 275 acres of that oddity: mature upland forest, steep feeder cliffs that shed sand onto the beach below, and 1.4 miles of shoreline bending east into Boundary Bay.

The Coast Salish name for this place is Chelhtenem, which translates as "hang salmon for drying" - a name describing labor rather than scenery. That labor was reef netting, and it was a technology of real sophistication. An artificial reef suspended between two anchored canoes guided migrating salmon upward, and the net was lifted at the instant a school passed over it. Net locations were inherited, and the best of them were worth defending. In 1889, sixteen reef nets worked the water off Lily Point, and a single net could take as many as two thousand fish in a day. This was the most important reef net fishery of the Central Coast Salish. In 1994, Chelhtenem was entered on the National Register of Historic Places as a site of national cultural, traditional and spiritual significance - only the second place in Washington State to receive that designation.

Industrial fishing arrived with a cannery built on the point in 1883 and sold the following year to new owners, who ran it through the boom decades of the Fraser sockeye runs. Fish traps - enormous stationary nets strung from pilings driven into the seabed - intercepted the same salmon the reef nets had always worked, at a scale the older fishery was never built to match. The cannery shut down in 1917. What it left behind is still on the beach: rows of blackened pilings marching seaward from the gravel, exposed at low tide, and scattered debris that the bay has been slowly dismantling for more than a century.

Lily Point came close to disappearing a second time, and recently. After Welsh Development, Inc. acquired the property, Whatcom County approved a plan that would have covered it with condominiums, a golf course, 74 residential lots, and a regional recreational resort. Then, for reasons never publicly explained, the developer let the permits lapse in 2003 without turning a shovel. The land went back on the market. In 2008 Whatcom County bought it, with The Nature Conservancy and the Whatcom Land Trust helping carry the cost, and opened it as a park and marine reserve. Standing under the second-growth canopy above the bluffs, it is hard not to think about how narrowly all of this survived a missed paperwork deadline.

Walk the switchbacks down to the beach and the argument for conservation makes itself. Bald eagles work the treeline. Herons stalk the tideflats, loons ride the chop offshore, and clams and crabs keep the intertidal busy. The eroding cliffs are not a defect but the mechanism - they resupply the beach with the coarse sediment that forage fish need for spawning, and those forage fish feed juvenile Chinook. Boundary Bay, whose ecological health is tied directly to this shoreline, is recognized as an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International, as a Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network site, and as a Ramsar wetland of international importance for waterfowl. Chelhtenem has changed remarkably little. The landforms, the vegetation, and the water that drew people to this corner are still doing exactly the work they always did.