A Long and Thorny Trek Across a 21st-Century Nature Preserve

Ready for a long and thorny trek?

Since 2023, when Filucy Bay Preserve grew to 170 acres, I have dreamed of traversing its landscape. It now crosses uplands to connect the bay’s north cove with Pitt Passage’s high bluffs to the east, giving the journey a seductive shoreline-to-shoreline arc.

The day is here. My companion is Nate Daniel, executive director of Great Peninsula Conservancy, the land trust that has been piecing together the preserve since 2013. The way will be rough. This is a 21st-century preserve, and in this day and age the conservation pieces — in this case, parcels donated or purchased from willing sellers — don’t always have matching backstories or the most natural fit. At least not right away.

Trails will be limited to the old tracks that were on the parcels before they were conserved. The ecosystems range from pristine to pummeled.

First Heart

We plunge into the heart of the forest.

It is gorgeous: cedars, hemlocks, maples, firs. Three of those four are late-successional species, trees that grow large only after a forest has been intact for nearly a century. A glacial erratic is so covered in moss we almost trip on it.

This is the 38-acre parcel that started it all, purchased and donated to GPC by a local whose wish was that its trees be spared the fate that befalls so many on our peninsula. 

There are no trails. Pushing downward through the underbrush, our feet are lost in carpets of false-lily-of-the-valley. Daniel finds emerging ghost pipe. He spots scat that looks like bear. What do I discover? A glob of barely congealed deer poop balanced in the crotch of an Oregon grape, right where the berries would be.

Much of the false-lily-of-the-valley has had its leaves eaten, leaving upright petioles like pale toothpicks. Deer browse? Could it be bear? We guess, and enjoy the guessing.

Trees tower overhead. Every few steps we dally over another discovery, another trace of life. Intact forest holds mysteries. Near the shoreline, we find the largest patch of wild ginger I have seen on the peninsula.

North Cove

A kingfisher calls. Big pistol butt firs arc out and up over glinting saltwater that has undercut the forest floor. From their exposed roots we watch a family of chickadees cross the cove and land overhead.

They cross from preserve to preserve, as GPC now owns most of both sides of Filucy Bay’s north cove. The shoreline forest is unbroken except for a small shellfish shack on a tiny inholding. Taylor Shellfish Farms leases the privately owned tide flats. They are far from the first to harvest clams and oysters here.

The shoreline, slick with forest duff, is rich in high-tide fish habitat. And intrigue. We find a deer rib cage that has been picked clean. A mostly buried contraption of wood and metal bulkheads may have been a boat or a sluice box of some kind. A glacial erratic on the beach has been cleaved in half. Bits of old rope are tangled in the barnacled cobbles alongside rockweed.

The cove is full of hints of pasts and futures. Beaches are inherently mixed-up environments, yet in its wholeness, its quiet of birdsong and wavelets, this place has serenity in spades. It is an anchor for this cobbled-together preserve.

Madronas Under Cedars

After scraping through vine maple and huckleberry, accruing scratches and spiderwebs, Daniel and I are surprised to emerge into a cove of cedars. The forest floor could be swept with a broom. Grateful, we gaze up.

How old are these trees? The family who sold this parcel to GPC owned and stewarded it for two generations. It shows. The whole forest, we decide, is a striking example of century-old second-growth. Still, there is evidence of the original disturbance. Not stumps. I’m still looking up. It is two trees that speak of old logging camps.

They are madronas, and large ones, their orange skin blackened with cankers. Large for a madrona is mid-sized for a cedar, and these two trees, which attained their size in the full sun of the post-clear-cut environment, have now been surpassed by the cedars. Starved for light, one is fully dead, while the other retains a high limb of bright leaves.

For a moment I reckon with the overlapping timelines here. In one, the white person timeline, this forest presents as a rare continuity: sizable, intact, stewarded for generations. That’s about the same timeline for these madronas. But on the cedar timeline, everything is young.

Chain-link And Thorns

We need an opening. For a moment, Daniel and I imagine ourselves deer. This next parcel, 25 acres added to the preserve in 2023, has a chain-link fence from a previous owner. Getting past fences is a daily challenge for wild animals on the peninsula, so I guess it’s fitting for our traverse.

We find a tiny stream that has undercut the fence and sneak through. Beyond a small pocket of woods spared as buffer for the creek, we are confronted with an explosion of blackberry blooms, a tempest of post-clear-cut thorns.

Clippers out, we enter the sun. Every other step we have to disentangle ourselves. We fight our way over a rise. We are greeted by more. A few young trees grow bravely among the vines.

Rebuffed, we skirt the margin of the fenceline. Isn’t that where animals go? Along the margins?

Somehow we find a way. Eventually we are in a strange thornless sea of grass and crooked alders. A fawn leaps out. It becomes clear that this swath of the preserve is quite wet: horsetail and skunk cabbage are underfoot. Dried mud. We pass an animal’s bedding spot. It’s a deep pocket within the chain-link and thorns.

The Scotch Broom/Blackberry Farm

The other half of the 25 acres is a place I know. It is where I was shown a yew tree that remains the largest I have documented on the peninsula. As Daniel and I climb toward it on a logging road, it seems our old moniker for this place — the scotch broom farm — might be obsolete. Blackberry is in the ascendancy.

State law requires clear cutters to replant at least 190 trees per acre. It does not require follow-up care. Here and there replanted firs have made it through a decade-plus of abandonment. They look healthy, but there are too few. GPC’s job will be to free them and add more.

Brilliant white daisies line the road. Tiger swallowtail butterflies glide past. From a blackcap raspberry we get a little taste of the clear-cut.

The champion yew is as orange-tinged as ever, sun-shocked. It has looked the same for years. It awaits the return of the shade that yews require.

Daniel shakes his head. It’s the long game, he says. What is important, for now, is that this parcel is preserved. It links the rest of the preserve. GPC’s timeline is perpetuity. There will be time to tackle this nightmare.

Slash Land Serengeti

Another 10 acres. Another clear-cut, this one more recently logged, and done with an eye to the future forest. The loggers scattered slash in a blanket to feed the next generation of trees. Invasive brush was sprayed with chemicals. Many trees were planted, and not just firs: there are young cedars, pines, redwoods.

The loggers left behind madronas. Their curving forms and umbrella tops give the place an odd echo of the Serengeti. Violet-green swallows zoom among them. Towhees call. Everything looks healthy as we clamber across the slash. 

I am eager to check in not on trees but shrubs. Soon after GPC acquired the parcel in 2023, a plant-savvy companion found snowbrush ceanothus here, a rare plant in a family also known as California lilacs. On a later survey, I found about 10 individual plants here, little ones, and deer had rudely stripped most of them of leaves. Daniel and I had kicked around the idea of a fence to protect them, but life got in the way.

Good thing we didn’t waste our time. An incredibly heady fragrance, rich and peppery, hits us in a wave. The largest snowbrush is taller than me. It radiates volatile oils in the sun. I cannot believe its growth.

Why Not Redwoods?

Now it is redwoods mixed into a vigorous and heterogeneous forest. Coast redwoods. Why not?

We have entered the final parcel, a diamond-shaped 20 acres also donated in 2023. At this point, thirsty and worn out, we are only too glad to travel on the mossy forest roads inherited with this land. The man who once owned it cut and planted trees in equal measure, often working by hand, and he had a thing for redwoods.

Around us is the second-most impenetrable underbrush we have seen all day, a riotous mix of huckleberry, salal, oceanspray, hazelnut, blackberry, and a dozen other things interwoven with honeysuckle. Trees of all kinds grow here. This is squirrel and bird land. Bear and cougar too, as a neighbor’s trail camera has proven.

The land narrows where it drops toward the Pitt Passage shoreline. Roadless again, we weave downhill. The bluff is 100 feet tall and crumbling. We want to look over its edge, widen our view of the Salish Sea, but the underbrush makes it impossible to see where the Earth drops away. Instead, under a massive maple, we plop down among candyflower blooms and rest.

Below The High Bluff

It is one of the lower tides of the year. At the water’s edge, I walk among tubeworms and moon snail collars in a search for eelgrass. Over at the toe of the bluff, Daniel inspects the glacial layers and finds ravens patrolling a high cliff, a likely nest site. I watch them soar before finding my own quarry. The eelgrass undulates in the waves.

The preserve includes 265 feet of shoreline. After our explorations, we sit on driftwood and look across to McNeil Island’s extensive forests and the prairies once farmed by inmates. We speculate about what it would take to care for such a landscape. It would be a massive undertaking. It would also be one of the few remaining opportunities around the Salish Sea — maybe the only one — to restore and preserve a whole-ecosystem landscape at that kind of scale.

Such an opportunity has been gone on the Key Peninsula since the earliest wagon routes and land claims. On our long and thorny trek, we never knew what we would find next. Such is the legacy of fragmentation. Land conservation in our neck of the woods is necessarily patchwork, yet deep in parcels large and small, pristine and far from it, we hang on to our natural heritage.

There will be plenty of hard work to restore Filucy Bay Preserve, but the bones are there. It is bonded not only by name but by shared future. It will grow together over time. Already it provides an anchor for peninsula landscapes far beyond it.