Mount Baker behind Anacortes ferry
— a white cone behind the wake.
Not only on a wall.
“The boat leaves Ship Harbor for the islands, the Yakima or the Chelan moving slow past the breakwater. The mainland slips off the stern and Baker keeps rising behind it, far inland, painted high onto the eastern sky. Coffee on the upper outside deck. The deckhands have seen it ten thousand times and still look. It comes free with the ticket on a clear morning, the way Rainier comes free with a drive down I-5.
Mount Baker behind Anacortes ferry, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Anacortes sits on Fidalgo Island in Skagit County, about eighty miles north of Seattle, and its Ship Harbor terminal is the mainland gateway to the four populated San Juan Islands and the seasonal run to Sidney, British Columbia. Mount Baker, a 10,781-foot stratovolcano known to the Lummi and Nooksack peoples as Kulshan, rises roughly sixty miles east-northeast across the Skagit Valley. From the ferry's upper deck the peak reads as a free-floating white cone above the lower Cascades, since the foreground hills stay well under three thousand feet. Washington State Ferries has run the route since 1951 and remains the only public scheduled link to the islands.
The Salish Sea sits in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains, so Anacortes averages around twenty-eight inches of rain a year, less than half what Forks gets to the southwest. Marine fog burns off through the morning; the cleanest Baker mornings tend to be late winter and early spring, when cold inland air keeps the lowland haze down and the volcano shows hard against a flat blue sky. Summer afternoons soften with haze from agricultural burns and wildfire smoke drifting from the interior, and Baker disappears for weeks at a time from late July into September on the worst smoke years.
Sailings from Anacortes run to Lopez, Shaw, Orcas, and San Juan islands every day of the year, plus a seasonal international run to Sidney on Vancouver Island. The clearest Mount Baker view comes on winter or spring mornings from the upper outside deck as the boat pulls out heading west. The mountain sits east-northeast, behind the wake, until Decatur Island blocks the line of sight roughly twenty minutes out. Late afternoon return sailings show Baker washed pink in alpenglow. Vehicle reservations are required from May through September; foot passengers walk on without one.