Qualla: Lily Point Marine Reserve

Lily Point Marine Reserve: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carport, CC BY-SA 3.0. Three nets, six hours, ten thousand salmon. That was one reported haul off these bluffs in 1881, and nobody at the time thought it extraordinary. Lily Point occupies the southeast corner of Point Roberts, a scrap of the United States marooned on the wrong side of the Canadian border, and its value has never had much to do with which flag flies over it. Every summer, sockeye returning to spawn in the Fraser River sweep around this headland in numbers that have fed families, funded canneries, and outlasted both. The bluffs are eroding. The pilings are rotting. The fish still come.

Image: Carport | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lily Point Marine Reserve: An Accident of the 49th Parallel

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carport, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

Image: Carport | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lily Point Marine Reserve: Chelhtenem

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carport, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 gu...

Image: Carport | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lily Point Marine Reserve: Cans and Pilings

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carport, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ...

Image: Carport | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lily Point Marine Reserve: The Golf Course That Wasn't

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carport, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 r...

Image: Carport | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lily Point Marine Reserve: What the Bay Keeps

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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

Image: Carport | CC BY-SA 3.0