Cama Beach preserves Camano Island's resort past for modern visitors

Cama Beach Historical State Park is still doing public work on Camano Island. The cabins are closed, but the shoreline, trails and cafe remain in use, turning a former private resort into a state-managed asset that still serves families, walkers and day-trippers on Saratoga Passage.

A resort that still works for the public

The park sits on the southwest shore of Camano Island and keeps a wide reach of water, beach and forest in public hands. That matters here because Cama Beach was never preserved as a frozen museum piece. It was folded into the state park system so the public could keep using the shoreline, the trails and the historic setting rather than losing the site to private development or leaving it unused.

Washington State Parks says the property has had several lives. For centuries it served as a summer fishing encampment for multiple Coast Salish peoples, then later became a logging camp before entrepreneur LeRoy Stradley built it as a fishing resort in 1934. Muriel and Lee Risk later operated the resort until the family closed it in 1989, after which the site eventually opened to the public as Cama Beach State Park on June 19, 2008. HistoryLink places that opening on June 21, 2008 and describes the park as a 434-acre beach-and-forest park.

Why the resort landscape still matters

The preservation value at Cama Beach is not just architectural nostalgia. The resort’s buildings largely retained their overall layout, which is part of why the place still reads as a 1930s waterfront retreat even as the state changed its use. The park once had 33 cabins in total, including waterfront cabins, second-row cabins and waterfront bungalows, so the property had real overnight capacity rather than just a decorative shoreline setting.

That scale helps explain why Cama Beach drew repeat visitors and why its public transition matters to Island County. The site kept enough of its original resort shape to tell a story about coastal leisure, but the state also kept it functional enough to provide trails, views and access for modern use. In other words, the public return on preservation is still visible on the ground: cabins, shoreline access and the old resort footprint remain part of the experience, even as the operating model has changed.

What visitors can still do now

Cama Beach remains open for day use, and the Cama Beach Cafe is still operating. The park page also says visitors can hike or bike across as much as 15 miles of trails, which gives the site more depth than a simple beach stop. A one-mile trail links Cama Beach with Camano Island State Park, making it possible to turn two parks into one longer outing instead of treating them as separate destinations.

The recreation package still fits the shoreline setting. Washington State Parks describes opportunities for hiking, birding and watching for orcas and gray whales from the beach, and the park brochure adds wildlife viewing and boating opportunities through the Center for Wooden Boats. Weekly interpretive opportunities run from mid-June through Labor Day, which keeps the historical side of the park active during the busiest visitor season.

Why the cabins closed

The biggest change in recent years came in February 2024, when Washington State Parks closed the cabins and lower-area restrooms after significant parts of the septic system failed and water and electric lines were damaged. State Parks later said the closure began on February 26, 2024. Those failures shifted the park from an overnight resort model to a day-use model and made the historic buildings less central to how the public experiences the site.

In October 2024, the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission voted to permanently keep the cabins closed. The commission also closed the Center for Wooden Boats, the historic park store, the park office and the lower restrooms. State Parks said reopening the lower area would require extensive ground disturbance in a place with known environmental and cultural complexities, so the decision was not just about plumbing, but about what kind of intervention the landscape can absorb.

A shoreline under pressure from the sea

Cama Beach is also now a climate case study. State Parks says it is the most vulnerable coastal park in the state system to sea level rise, and the agency has warned that rising seas, king tides, winter storms, high winds and wave action are worsening damage to the aging seawall. In January 2026, about a 20-foot section of that seawall collapsed, forcing a temporary closure of the lower park area for safety.

The agency has continued to make targeted repairs, including work completed in January 2026 on the park’s Vault 4 septic lift station. That repair could allow restrooms near the middle of the park to reopen and help support larger events at the Cama Center. It is a small but telling sign of how the site is being managed now: not as a place to restore all at once, but as a public landscape where each repair has to be weighed against shoreline conditions, infrastructure limits and long-term resilience.

Why the preservation debate still resonates

Cama Beach drew deep public feeling because it sits at the intersection of resort history, tribal history and public access. Public comments submitted to State Parks called for ecological restoration, indigenous cultural sensitivity and preservation of culturally significant places under tribal leadership. One commenter described the site as the “sole remaining large historic 1930s waterfront family saltwater fishing resort,” which captures why the place still carries weight far beyond Camano Island.

The most useful way to understand Cama Beach is as a working compromise. It is still scenic, still historic and still open, but it is no longer being asked to function as an overnight resort in the same way it once did. The cabins are closed, the shoreline remains public, and the state is now managing the property as a coastal asset that must keep serving residents and visitors while adapting to the realities of a changing shoreline.