Kitsap Peninsula
Lighthouses
Monday Walks
A Walk Through Point No Point County Park
Monday, January 02, 2017TheCambrians
You’ve got to hand it to the early European explorers. They came up with some interesting and descriptive
names for the places they charted: There’s Cape Caution, Foulweather Bluff, Useless Bay
and Cape Fear, to name only a few. But my personal favourite has to be Point No
Point because it always prompts stupid questions from me and David like,
“what’s the point?”
To
Charles Wilkes, who named it in 1841, there wasn’t one. But he was wrong.
Now
on the National Historic Register and a Kitsap County Park, it’s hard not to
see the point: A beautiful, driftwood strewn beach, the site of Puget Sound’s
first lighthouse, an Important Bird Area and a trail that runs through a small
section of forest offer an excellent place to spend the day . . . and to take a
walk.
Only
a 20-minute drive north of Kingston
to the seaside village of Hansville, the first attraction is actually outside the park boundaries on the
road leading to Point No Point Lighthouse. In 1971, the M/V Jupiter Inlet, a 185-foot ocean-going
naval tug, was sold for scrap and the bridge and found a second life as a house
– I’d love to have a look inside!
We
like to start our walk along the beach near the lighthouse keeper’s duplex.
Half
of the duplex houses the executive offices of the US Lighthouse Society (which
moved from San
Francisco to
Hansville) and the other half is open for holiday rental. Tours are given on Saturdays
at one and three
o’clock from April through
September, but we’ve never been inside.
In
the side yard, there’s a garden with interesting sculptures made out of
driftwood.
And
a plaque commemorating the signing of the Point No Point Treaty in 1855 between
the leaders of the S’Klallam, Chimacum and Skokomish Native tribes and the
governor of Washington, ceding land from the crest of the Olympic Mountains to Puget Sound to
the United
States.
Point
No Point Lighthouse is next. Docents are on site from 12 to 4:00 pm on weekends, April through September, to help answer questions and
for short tours but it’s not possible to climb the tower to see the Fresnel
lens which was taken out of use in 2006 (an automated optic light is now in
operation).
We
like to follow the shoreline south for a mile or so, enjoying the driftwood
forts . . .
.
. . before climbing the stairs to the forest along the ridge that leads to
another trailhead.
On
the way back to the parking lot, we like to walk inland a bit through the
wetlands and an Important Bird Area.
And
that wraps up our walk through Point No Point County Park in Hansville, Washington. I hope you enjoyed it. If you’d like to read more
walks through interesting and unique places, you can check out Restless Jo and
Jo’s Monday Walks.
How about you? Have you been on an interesting walk
lately? We’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.
