Washington State Parks: The San Juan Islands to Puget Sound

The Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission oversees a system of 120 state parks that span the state from sandy beaches to the rugged terrain of the Columbia River Gorge.  The state’s park system is organized into regions and the more popular websites provide information based on that regional layout.
 
Carved by massive glaciers millions of years ago, The San Juan Islands Region—Lopez, Orcas, and San Juan being the largest--encompasses the more than 700 islands that comprise the San Juan Archipelago; only about 175 of the islands are large enough to have been named.  (The islands were given their Spanish names by the Spanish naval officer who discovered the islands in 1791.) Walking along the shores of San Juan County—no county in the USA has more shoreline—beach goers can see peaks of the Cascade Mountain Range, including Mount Baker in the distance.  The Islands draw outdoor enthusiasts from northwest Washington and their Canadian neighbors to the north.

South of the San Juan Islands lies Puget Sound.  Millions of years ago both the Islands and Puget Sound were mountain regions; like its Scandinavian cousins, the fjord, Puget Sound is the result of massive glaciers cutting their way from the mountains to the ocean.  The melting glaciers provided the initial water for the sound and created one of the world’s great estuaries, a unique marine environment that is home to some 40 marine parks.  When discovered and named by George Vancouver in 1792, Puget Sound applied to that part of the sound south of the Tacoma Narrows; modern usage applies the name to the entire sound.  The state park system divides the sound into two regions, North Puget Sound and South Puget Sound, in its organization of parks.