Yellow Island lies southwest of Orcas Island and north of Shaw, a low tuft of grass and rock in the middle of the San Juan archipelago, with Jones Island State Park close by. More than fifty species of wildflower bloom across it. Broadleaf shooting star nods in pink clusters. Hairy Indian paintbrush burns orange-red. Chocolate lily hangs its strange mottled bells low to the ground, and stonecrop spreads yellow over bare rock. Camas covers the slopes in blue. The shoreline holds its own inventory: black oystercatchers picking along the rocks with their absurd red bills, harlequin ducks riding the current, harbour seals hauled out on the reefs, and bald eagles working the whole thing from above. For an island you can walk end to end in fifteen minutes, the species count is ridiculous.

Camas prairie is a cultivated landscape that looks like wilderness. Left alone on this coast, open grassland becomes forest within a few decades, because Douglas fir seedlings establish easily and shade out everything beneath them. Coast Salish communities in the San Juans prevented that by setting low, controlled fires, which killed encroaching seedlings without harming the deep bulbs, cleared thatch, and returned nutrients to the soil. The camas harvest that followed fed families through winter. That practice was interrupted along with almost everything else after European settlement, and the consequences showed up slowly, as trees crept in from the margins of islands that had been nearly treeless at the start of the twentieth century.

Lewis and Elizabeth Dodd, known as Lew and Tib, bought Yellow Island in the mid-1940s and set about living on it. They built a cottage out of driftwood gathered off their own beaches, glazing the windows with panes salvaged from a chicken coop they had on Orcas Island. It was a genuinely handmade house on a genuinely remote island, without the conveniences that would have made either easier, and they stayed. In 1979, the family sold the island to The Nature Conservancy, choosing that buyer specifically because they wanted the place kept as it was when the Dodds arrived. The cabin still stands, and the Conservancy maintains it.

Restoration here meant doing deliberately what had once been done routinely. Beginning in the 1980s, The Nature Conservancy began setting prescribed burns on Yellow Island to push back the encroaching firs and invasive grasses and to give the wildflowers room. Fire as a conservation tool still unsettles people, and on a small island covered in dry grass it demands precision, but the results are visible every spring in the density of the bloom. A resident land steward lives on the island year-round, tending the Dodds' driftwood and stone cottage, recording the island's natural history day by day, and running the burns. It is a job with a population of one and a commute measured in footsteps.

The preserve is open to visitors who arrive by small boat, kayak, or dinghy, and it asks a lot in return. Landing is on the beach, and from there people are expected to stay on the main trail, because on an island this small a single season of foot traffic through the meadow undoes work that takes years. There is no dock, no facility, no shelter from weather. What there is instead is the rare experience of standing inside a Pacific Northwest prairie at full bloom, a habitat that has almost entirely disappeared from the region, on ground that has been actively managed by people for centuries and is still being managed by one person now.