Jetty Island is Everett’s Best Summer Chill Spot. Change My Mind.
Editor’s note: Originally published July 2, 2018. Updated June 22, 2023.
If you live in Everett, Jetty Island is a place you can be proud of.
It’s a civic treasure, a two-mile long man-made island. And the beach is oh-so-nice. Every summer you can ride a charming little boat to the island and lay on warm sand, enjoying panoramic views of the Salish Sea and the Olympic Mountains.
Talking about Jetty Island is a pleasure because I get to use cool words like riprap, dredging, semipalmated plover, and, yes, ghosts.
Let’s take a look at what makes this place special and what you can expect when you visit.*
Riprap
This word refers to a type of rock, not a genre of hip hop. Riprap is the loose stone piled up on the east side of Jetty Island. This protects the isle from being eroded into Possession Sound by the Snohomish River.
The island serves as a breakwater (also a cool word), protecting boats in the marina from sloshing waves.
Dredging
Jetty was made 100 years ago from sediment dredged from the Snohomish River. The dredgermen had to deposit the sand somewhere, so they lined the harbor, creating a safe port for ships and seafood processing plants built on piers. These processing plants were called slimehouses.
You can still see the pilings that the slimehouses once stood on, now covered in barnacles.
Why dredge? To make the river deeper for ships. 100 years ago the Snohomish River was the main “road” inland to the then-major cities of Lowell** and Snohomish-- the route by which most people traveled. I’m sad that I missed out on the era of boat travel as a practical form of regional transportation.
Semipalmated Plover
I personally like my plovers completely palmated, but whatevs.
Semipalmated plovers are shorebirds that live on Jetty, along with 44 other avian species. That’s an astounding number! Jetty Island is a veritable Galapagos of northwest birds, home to short-billed dowitcher, yellowlegs, sandpipers, and osprey, among others.
Ghost ship
As we previously reported, the shores of Jetty Island were once the resting place of the Equator, a pygmy schooner that was (among many things) a coconut ship and Robert Louis Stevenson’s boat. Allegedly the Equator is haunted by the ghost of a Hawaiian King. You can see the salvaged ship where it rests in a shed on the marina.
The Future
A startling thought: will Jetty Island always be here? Rising ocean levels spell trouble for our fave manmade isle. On the other hand, if Jetty is so much deposited sand, could it just be built up indefinitely to mitigate the effects of climate change?
I’m not a civil engineer. But I am curious to know. If you have any insight send me an email.
Funsies
Visit the island and enjoy it for yourself. It’s open seasonally. Jetty Island Days begin on July 5. You can get a link to the ferry schedule at the bottom of this article.
A few pro tips if you visit:
Wear sunscreen, bring shade. I’ve learned the hard way that there’s no shade provided on the beach. A nice preventative tent or parasol can save you a fortune in aloe.
Reservations are required. The ferry lost city funding, but The Port of Everett swooped in to save the day and is handling reservations for a nominal fee. You’ll find fees and schedules on the Port of Everett website.
Pack a lunch. There’s a small snack shack on the island, but nothing that says “meal.” If you’re going to be in the hot sun all day you may want to provide your own grub.
Be prepared to take photos that blow up social media. The view is very beautiful.
*The research for this article was surprisingly tricky, cobbled together as it was from different sources. If there’s a complete history of Jetty Island out there in single document form I have yet to come across it.
**Yep, Lowell was its own city. It wasn’t annexed to Everett until the 1960s. But that’s a story for another article.
Richard Porter is a writer for Live in Everett.
