After our hike on Jones Island, we picked up anchor and headed over to Stuart Island on Friday. This was an island that I had read about and was looking forward to visiting. Much of the island is privately owned, but there are several county (think gravel) roads that can be hiked as well as public lands with hiking trails and parks. There are only about 30 year round residents here and they live here with no power (some have solar power), no water (some have septic tanks but most have outhouses) and no phones. You can get cell phone service from some the hill tops on the island but it is not reliable. There's no ferry service, so one must have a boat or a plane to get here. Life on Stuart Island seems quite simple and idyllic for these folks.

To add to this simple charm, there is also a floating Art Gallery in the middle of Reid Harbor (where we anchored at the South end of Stuart Island). When I spotted the art gallery as we were coming into Reid Harbor, it moved to the top of my list of places to see while there. It's actually both, a gallery and home, to photographer Peter Fromm (www.frommphotos.com) during the summer. Peter is a long time resident of the San Juan Islands and has an amazing collection of nature and landscape photos from the area. The gallery itself is a small, rustic wooden barge with gallery at the water level and living quarters upstairs. He also has a nice little wooden sailboat tied next to the gallery.

On Saturday, we went for a long hike to the other end of the island. The island is rich with history and stories from a cast of characters that inhabited the island previously. During our hike, we visited an old school house and the Turn Point light house. One of the highlights of the hike was finding an unmarked trail that bypassed the steep 150 stair climb on our way back!

Above is my attempt to make a collage of pictures in GIMP from our visit to Reid Harbor (we are limited to one photo per post on this blog platform).