Camping, Lake Goodwin, a beach and a barn

July, 2021

Yes, there are photos of a great barn coming at the end of this blog post. But don’t you sneak ahead! Check out this beach first. I love barns, but I loved this beach too.

A friend of mine, Jan, drove up and spent the day with me today. That was extra fun.

Here’s the beach (below). The saltwater of Puget Sound is off to the right. This type of beach is extremely common hereabouts. Winter storms and winter high tides bring saltwater and really big logs up onto the flat land that runs along the beach. But for most of the year, these areas are dry enough to have paths running through them. As usual, please stay on the path and let the wild areas continue to be wild and natural. Areas like this are called “beach berms”.

 

 

The tide was low/out when we were here. You can see the remains of lots of wood pilings used many years ago.

The name of this place is English Boom. What the heck is that? A firing range? A place for a drumming circle? Hmmmm. See the two maps below for details of this location. The RED star is where I’m boondocked at the north end of Lake Goodwin.

 

Here’s the scoop on the name “English Boom”. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the land here was owned by the “English Lumber Company”. They harvested trees off of Camano Island and from forests east of Stanwood. They hauled the logs to this beach where the logs were put in the water into booms which were then tied to all of those dozens of pilings you see out in the tide flats. Eventually the log booms were towed by tugboats to various sawmills throughout Puget Sound. Each group of logs was called a log boom, but the entire storage area was also called a boom. So that’s why the word “boom” is part of the name of this place today. Island County (Whidbey and Camano islands) purchased the land in 1997 and turned it into a county park.

The photos below were taken of signs posted here at the English Boom county park. Skip over them if you aren’t interested in this much detail. Click on each one to enlarge them if you wish.

 

 

 

 

Drilling holes in the logs that corralled the other logs was always done by hand … dangerous work.

So that’s a bit of the history of this area, why there are pilings in the tide flats and why this place is called a “boom”. Now let’s get back to today when my friend Jan and I were here and see what’s happening.

 

 

 

Enough with the signs already … let’s see what’s going on around us. 🙂

Little Towhee (the bird) was out there with us of course. As I was standing out near the beach and enjoying looking back at the old trees, I heard Little Towhee cheeping loudly “Look, up there, there’s a huge nest! Look!” You can see Little Towhee in the bottom left of the photo below, and you can see the huge nest right in the middle of photo, near the top.

Little Towhee was so excited and was leaning back so far in order to get a good look at that nest that she almost tipped her basket-perch over. But I caught her, just in time.

Here’s a closeup of the nest. Is it stable enough that birds would still be using it? It was huge.

And then I realized why it was huge. Look at the photo below. And then look up at the larger photo above with the nest in the distance … look in the very upper right corner of that photo and you will see a small dot. Well, that “dot” was a Bald Eagle! So I’d bet that nest is still being used.

My friend and I (and Little Towhee) eventually had to stop staring at the nest and the Bald Eagle. We walked out along the path that led through the “beach berm”, alongside the beach, through the beach grass and old drift logs. It smelled so good out here. My friend identified some of the plants; I didn’t know what any of them were, I just enjoyed them. 🙂 There were lots of bird calls, mostly seagulls, but other birds too. And there was the ever-present very gentle splish splash of little lapping wavelets coming up onto the beach from the saltwater.

 

 

 

 

 

Something smelled really sweet out here. I don’t think either one of us knew what it was that smelled so good. The plants were fascinating.

And then it was time to climb back into the big white truck and head back towards my boondocking spot at Lake Goodwin so we could get some lunch. That’s always a good time of day. 🙂

On the drive back towards Stanwood (still on Camano Island), we passed this barn (below). It’s obviously a working barn.

Here’s a close-up photo (below) with the large barn doors swung wide to allow the mechanical system to be set up there to load bales of hay up into the barn for storage. Interesting and smart that they use bales of hay to support the mechanism. That barn was huge. Think about how much hay there must be in there. Hey now, that’s a lot of hay!

This was our morning adventure. The adventures my friend and I had in the afternoon will be in the next blog post … a completely different destination.

But for THIS blog post … which did you like best … the barn, the beach, the boom history, the eagle? Or something else? Let me know what speaks to you.