San Juan Island-Hopping

What follows is six days built around the fact that no road comes here, and that the water keeps the schedule. You arrive the fast way — a private car to Lake Union, then a seaplane north over Puget Sound with the Cascades on one side and the harbors filling with sailboats below — and after that nothing moves quickly again. Roche Harbor holds the first three nights. Day two is a full day in a kayak along the forested shoreline, on protected water whose density of marine life is the reason people come, and which offers a real chance of orcas at eye level rather than from a rail; it ends with a beachside dinner of local fish and oysters. Day three asks almost nothing of the morning — a coastal walk, a working farm, salt air — and then sends a zodiac out in the afternoon to some of the best whale water in the world, for minke, humpback, and orca.

Then the ferries, and the ferries are the point. Day four crosses to Lopez Island for the San Juan Islands National Monument, with breakfast made by the guides on the water and two trails along protected shoreline and tideland — Shark Reef, Iceberg Point, Point Colville — before a second crossing that afternoon to Orcas. Rosario Resort takes the last two nights: the 1906 mansion of Robert Moran, a Seattle shipbuilder who later handed the state the land you walk the next day. Six or seven miles up through Moran State Park, glacier-rounded granite and old growth closing overhead and then opening at the ridgeline, to the summit of Mount Constitution and the view that explains the whole archipelago at once. E-bikes and kayaks are there instead if you want them. The last morning is left empty on purpose — the guided rhythm stops, the ferry back is the only appointment, and the islands go on doing what they were doing before you came.