Qualla: Patos Island Light

Patos Island Light: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lumpytrout, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1905 Edward Durgan took the keeper's job at Patos Island and moved his wife and most of his thirteen children onto it. The island is a couple of hundred acres of rock and fir at the far northern edge of the San Juan archipelago, with no store, no school, no neighbours, and a fog signal that had to be answered at any hour of the night. They stayed until the early 1910s. Decades later one of those children, Helene Durgan Glidden, published The Light on the Island, a memoir of that childhood that has stayed in print ever since - a book about boredom, weather, boats, danger, and the specific experience of growing up somewhere that only had one building and an enormous amount of water.

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Image: Lumpytrout | CC BY-SA 3.0

Patos Island Light: Isla de Patos

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heloise7, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name arrived more than a century before the light did. In 1791 the Spanish expedition under Francisco de Eliza was charting the Strait of Georgia and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the first pilot, Juan Pantoja y Arriaga, noted the astonishing number of waterfowl around this...

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Image: Heloise7 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Patos Island Light: Twelve Thousand Dollars

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bureau of Land Management, Public domain. On 3 March 1891 the United States Congress appropriated $12,000 for a fog signal station at Patos. What it bought was modest: a post light and a third-class Daboll trumpet, a reed-driven fog horn that produced a sound loud enough to be heard through weather that hid everything el...

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Image: Bureau of Land Management | Public domain

Patos Island Light: Keeping the Light

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0. A keeper's life at a station like this was less romantic than the postcards suggest and more relentless. The lens had to be cleaned and the lamp tended nightly. The fog signal had to be run whenever visibility closed in, which on this coast is often. Supplies came by boat, weathe...

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Image: Joe Mabel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Patos Island Light: Still an Aid to Navigation

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Markshanejohnson, CC BY-SA 3.0. Patos Island Light was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 and remains an active aid to navigation - not a museum piece with a working replica, but a light that boats still use. In 2008 federal funding through the Bureau of Land Management paid for a thoroug...

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Image: Markshanejohnson | CC BY-SA 3.0

Patos Island Light: Three Agencies and a Volunteer Group

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lumpytrout, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2013 Patos Island became part of the San Juan Islands National Monument, established by President Barack Obama and managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The arrangement on the ground is more collaborative than that implies. Washington State Parks handles the limited develo...

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Image: Lumpytrout | CC BY-SA 3.0