Patos Island Light Station

 

1940 photo, taken from the water (about here), of the Patos Island lighthouse station. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Patos Island is one of the outer islands in the San Juan archipelago, and has been a point of fascination for my family this fall due to the riveting stories in Helene Glidden's Light on the Island.  We were eager to make a trip out to the island to explore the light station and try to place the many stories in the book, which is a fictionalized account of Helene Glidden's childhood there in the early 20th century.  Patos Island is out there (20 nautical miles from Friday Harbor) and exposed (weather conditions have to be good) but we finally made the trip and found that, unlike many of the light stations around the Salish Sea that we have visited (and that are featured in this blog), the modern scene on Patos looks quite a bit different:

28 November 2020 photo of the Patos Island light station, shot from the water.

I didn't quite hit the photo perspective just right - notably the white band in the modern photo is a concrete foundation of the building that is furthest to the right in the historical image, and suggests that I include more of the island in my modern perspective than the historic photo does.  Despite that, though, the differences in the perspectives are clear.  Unlike many light stations in the Salish Sea, most of the buildings that used to make up the light station are now gone.