Here is another installment of photos from our road trip to Anacortes, Washington in July 2022. You can find prior posts by following the Road Trip tag in the side bar. On a pleasant, somewhat overcast Sunday morning we headed out to visit the Samish Overlook. At 1,200 feet (365 meters) above sea level it has great views across Samish Bay to the San Juan Islands and across the farmlands of Skagit County. This panorama is the view that greets you when you step away from the parking lot. Click on the picture to embiggen.

I found out about the Samish Overlook when I was looking for good places to hike. That search led me to find the Oyster Dome trail, a five-mile round-trip hike with 1,050 foot (320 meter) elevation gain. In the end, I didn’t have any takers for the hike, but the overlook seemed like a good place to visit. And it was.

To get there from Anacortes, you need to go east to Burlington, take I-5 north exiting at Lake Samish road. Going west from there you turn left on Barrell Springs road and shortly come to a right turn to go to Mount Blanchard and the Samish Overlook. It was quite steep in a section shortly before arriving at the overlook, but apparently the road has been upgraded since I was there.

Here is a view looking southwest with Samish Bay in the foreground, Padilla Bay on the far side of the peninsula, and Anacortes in the distance.

Samish Bay was where Pacific oysters first grew after being tossed from a cargo ship in 1919. There are not many oyster farms on the bay today. Whenever we are in Anacortes, we visit Taylor Shellfish Farms which is right below the Samish Overlook. I wrote about a wonderful dinner that came out of a visit to Taylor back in November of 2020. You can see the Taylor’s oyster beds from the northwest side of the overlook.

There are other oyster beds visible across Samish Bay near Samish Island.

While the panoramic views are nice, the flora around the parking lot and trails is very pretty. Here are some lady’s glove flowers (also known as foxglove). The flowers are poisonous, but are also the original source of the heart medication digitalis (also known as digioxin). Who knew?

The view to the west is as impressive as the view to the south. Lummi Island is on the right and I believe the large island beyond it is Orcas Island, the largest of the San Juan Islands.

Here is a panorama that covers Samish Bay, Padilla Bay, the Rosario Straight with the San Juan Islands in the distance. Left to right, you have Fidalgo Island and Anacortes with the steam rising from the Anacortes refinery, Samish Island in the middle of the frame, Guemes Island behind it, Cypress Island, and Orcas and Lummi Islands as in the single frame image.

As I mentioned above, I found this place by looking for a place to hike. We had noticed in our visits to Taylor Shellfish that there was a trailhead along Washington 11. That trail goes up to the Samish Overlook and to Oyster Dome, along with a bunch of other places in the Blanchard Trail System. There is a nice sign with a map of all the trails at the overlook, which is what you would see with the prior link to a PDF.

The trail can be reached from the northwest side of the parking lot. You can go down to Chuckanut or up onto the trails.

These trails are part of the Pacific Northwest Trail. This 1,200 mile (1,900 kilometer) trail starts along the Continental Divide in Montana, crosses Idaho and Washington, and finally ends at the Pacific Ocean on the Olympic Coast of Washington. It crosses three national parks and several mountain ranges. I have now hiked 100 feet (30 meters) of the trail, meaning I have completed .002% of the trail.

It’s time to hike off the in the distance this month. More installments are ahead, including the Bonneville Dam and other sights on our way south. With a recent trip to Death Valley, I may need to pick up my pace of posting. We will see.