Qualla: San Juan Islands National Monument

San Juan Islands National Monument: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit This image was taken by me and is released for public use., Public domain. Most national monuments are somewhere you can drive to and stand in the middle of. This one is a list. The San Juan Islands National Monument consists of roughly seventy-five separate sites, scattered across three counties and dozens of miles of the Salish Sea, and together they total about a thousand acres - smaller than many city parks, and broken into pieces so fine that one of them, Cotton Point Island off Orcas, covers a quarter of an acre and ranks among the smallest holdings the Bureau of Land Management has anywhere in Washington. President Barack Obama signed it into existence on 25 March 2013 under the Antiquities Act, out of land the federal government already owned. Nothing was bought. What changed was the level of protection - and, more quietly, the recognition of what these fragments actually are.

Image: This image was taken by me and is released for public use. | Public domain

San Juan Islands National Monument: A Monument Made of Rocks

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Tmfurey at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. Read the inventory and the character of the thing becomes clear. Mackaye Harbor Rocks. Danger Rocks. Kanaka Bay Islands. Bakers Reef. Unnamed Rocks off Lime Kiln Point. Site after site is a reef, a stack, or an islet too small and too exposed for anyone ever to have built on it, ...

Image: User: (WT-shared) Tmfurey at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

San Juan Islands National Monument: Lights on the Edges

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Finetooth, CC BY-SA 3.0. Not every piece is a rock. Some of the monument's most significant sites are headlands that mattered to anyone trying to get a ship through these waters alive. Cattle Point, at the southern tip of San Juan Island, carries its light above the meeting of Haro Strait and the Strait ...

Image: Finetooth | CC BY-SA 3.0

San Juan Islands National Monument: Coast Salish Ground

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bureau of Land Management, Public domain. The proclamation names archaeological sites of the Coast Salish peoples among the resources the monument exists to protect, and that is not incidental language. These waters were - and are - Coast Salish waters, worked for thousands of years for salmon, halibut, shellfish, camas ...

Image: Bureau of Land Management | Public domain

San Juan Islands National Monument: Small Pieces, Large Consequence

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0. Biodiversity is the third pillar of the designation, and here the arithmetic works in the monument's favour. Bare, predator-free rocks are the scarcest real estate in the Salish Sea for nesting seabirds; a reef with no raccoons on it is worth far more to a colony of glaucous-wing...

Image: Joe Mabel | CC BY-SA 3.0