Deception Pass

Some of our children and grandchildren were here over the holidays and I managed to get out with my son-in-law for several photographic excursion, one of them on January 4th to Deception Pass, a popular and beautiful tourist destination in western Washington.

Deception Pass is a waterway between Fidalgo and Whidbey Islands.  The explanation of the name is give on the sign at the parking lot and refers to the discovery of the pass by Europeans several hundred years ago.

One of the features of the pass is the bridge, built in the 1930's and standing at 177 feet above the water.  There are actually two spans, the shorter bridging Canoe Pass and the longer Deception Pass and connecting at Pass Island.

We walked across the bridge to Pass Island and took photos from the bridge and from the island which can be accessed from the bridge, including photos of the beautiful Pacific Madrone trees which grow all over the cliffs around the pass.

There and on the beach I also photograph some lichens and fungi, including a mushroom tentatively identified as the Cucumber Cap, the Common Jellyspot Fungus, the Ragbag and Coastal Reindeer and Cladonia Scales Lichens.

After exploring the bridge and Pass Island we hiked down to the shore and while my son-in-law experimented with differently colored strobe filters I wandered around photographing whatever I could find including seaweed and rocks.

Pass Island and Goose Rock

Tuesday, February 26th was a dry day and we decided to go and see if the Grass Widows were blooming at Pass Island.  They were and we spent the afternoon there and at Goose Rock nearby.  We walked the Deception Pass bridge to Pass Island and when we were finished returned to the south end of the bridge and hiked the half mile trail to the top of Goose Rock.

Pass Island lies in the middle of the waterway between Fidalgo and Whidbey Islands and separates Canoe Pass to the north from Deception Pass to the south.  The bridge between the two islands is in two spans which connect in the middle of the waterway on Pass Island.  One can walk the bridge and access Pass Island from the bridge.

These are older pictures of Pass Island and the Deception Pass Bridge, the first taken from Whidbey Island and showing the larger of the two spans with Pass Island the area in the background, the second showing both spans with Pass Island on the right and taken from Cornet Bay area of Deception Pass State Park and looking west our into the San Juan Straits.

It was there we saw one the earliest of our native wildflowers, the Grass Widow, once known as Sisyrinchium douglasii and now reclassified and placed in a genus of its own as Olsynium douglasii.  It is in the Lily family and is native to the Pacific Northwest from British Columbia to California.  Where it gets its name "Grass Widow" I do not know.

There was nothing else in bloom, though the Mahonias (Sea Grape) were budding and should be open soon, but we did get pictures of some of the other plants that grow there (most of these pictures are my wife's, as are some of the others in this post).

Finished exploring Pass Island we headed back south by way of the bridge and climbed Goose Rock, a massive outcrop that lies at the south side of Deception Pass.  There was nothing blooming along the way but we enjoyed the hike and took some pictures of the views at the top (the first with the Olympic Mountains in the background), also of the granite balds and Madrona trees that grow there.