In 1792, naval officer George Vancouver was exploring Puget Sound, naming things after his pals on behalf of the British Empire. Of course, these things already had names (and names that sounded a lot cooler than “Puget,” “Gardner,” and “Whidbey”), but they were hard to pronounce, and asking the natives what they called the local geography was not a priority for His Majesty’s Naval Service. So instead of Tacoma we have Rainier, and instead of Koma Kulshan we have Baker, and more’s the pity.
One of the names Vancouver did not botch was that of the strait separating Whidbey Island from Fidalgo Island. An initial survey of the region missed this strait, which led Vancouver to believe that both Whidbey and Fidalgo were one peninsula jutting into Puget Sound from the mainland. He caught the strait the second time around, and was so flabbergasted by its existence that he named it, “Deception Pass.” This is certainly the greatest name on Whidbey, if not the greatest name anywhere, with Useless Bay coming in at a close second.
Today, a bridge links Whidbey to Fidalgo Island, connecting the two ends of Deception Pass State Park, and providing an incredible view of both the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the west, and Skagit Bay to the east. Beneath the bridge, barnacles, anemones, and limpits cling to basalt boulders veined with quartz—an intertidal ecosystem along a beautiful beach. It hardly seems a harsh enough place to deserve a name like Deception Pass, but perhaps that’s just part of its charm.
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