Hood Canal: Washington's Natural "Canal"

 

"The Hood Canal waters journey from China, from San Francisco and from Alaska, past Victoria and down the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Leaving Puget Sound with a hard right, as if the water had a mind of its own, it cannels below the snow-capped Olympic Mountains for 45 miles until it eddies into Annas Bay..... when it elbows east it seems to hook into a separate ecosystem, not only of geography but also of mind; it becomes a source for creamers, drifters and vagabonds. It creates a vacationland of warm days and inspiring scenery and its shores attracted four of America's great fortunes: California gold, Alaska gold, Washington timber and Seattle's Microsoft..."

So begins the Images of America book on Hood Canal. This delightful read has fully four pages of the history of Hood Canal. I quote from this book.................

Named after the Right Honorable Lord Samuel Hood, member of the British Board of Admiralty, by Capt. George Vancouver in 1792 who called it the "mouth of the loveliest river." The first building on Hood Canal was a blockhouse at Union (which has an interesting history itself). In 1851, loggers arrived; Pope and Talbot built a mill at Port Gamble. The treaty of Point No Point in 1855 scattered the local tribes. By the 1860s, tug boats were hauling logs up the Canal to Port Gamble. Lake Cushman sprouted a new dream for the area: tourism, which continues to this day. In the late 1930s, the CCC corps constructed many improvements around the Canal.

"The Hood Canal is a jewel of mountain scenery and beautiful water and it has been loved....first by native peoples, then by loggers, then artists and the wealthy and now by all the rest of us."

Hood Canal: Bay, River Or Fjord?

 

Everybody in Washington knows about Hood Canal but how much do we know? 

Named by Capt. George Vancouver on May 13, 1792, in honor of Admiral Lord Samuel Hood, Hood Canal is a fjord-like body of water lying west of the main basins of Puget Sound. It is a natural waterway and not a man-made canal. 

Hood Canal is long (about 50 miles)  and narrow (average width, 1.5 miles), with a mean depth of 177 feet and has 213 miles of shoreline and 42 miles of tideland. 

Formed some 13,000 years ago, Hood Canal was created by retreating glaciers. True fjords are long narrow inlets in valleys carved by glacial activity; hence Hood Canal originating off Puget Sound and the Salish Sea.

This is a proposal to change the name of Hood Canal to Salish Fjord since the feature is not a canal. This name change would also honor the Salish Nation whose peoples have been there for thousands of years. 

Stay tuned on that idea. :-)