Qualla: Yellow Island

Yellow Island: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The flowers on Yellow Island are not an accident of soil or luck. They are the product of fire, applied on purpose, for a very long time. Coast Salish peoples burned this eleven-acre island and others like it to keep the trees back and the prairie open, because the open ground grew camas, whose bulbs were a staple food worth a great deal of work to protect. When the burning stopped, Douglas firs began marching in from the edges. When The Nature Conservancy started burning again in the 1980s, the meadow came back. In late April, the island turns into a sheet of colour visible from a passing boat, which is the whole reason anyone notices it at all.

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Yellow Island: Fifty Kinds of Colour

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. Hai...

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Yellow Island: A Crop You Have to Burn For

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 preven...

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Yellow Island: Lew and Tib

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 g...

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Yellow Island: Lighting the Match Again

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 conservat...

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Yellow Island: Going Ashore Carefully

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 undo...

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