The San Juan Islands by Land and Sea: Hidden Anchorages

Thousands of visitors are drawn annually to the San Juan Islands, which are famed for their safe, scenic boating, lush meadows and dense forests, abundant bird life, and fascinating bits of history. Most of those visitors (and residents alike) have relied on this best-selling guide to outdoor recreation in the Islands. Now in a fully revised third edition, the book covers everything you want to know about park and marina facilities, beaches, shorelines, historic sites, natural science, and marine life. Whether you arrive by land, sea, or air, this fact-filled guide is a must for enjoying the best of the San Juans.

A book that reviews the rich history and residents of Friday Harbor throughout the past 100 years.

This is a biography and astonishing adventure story of a woman who, left a widow in 1927, packed her five children onto a 25-foot boat and cruised the coastal waters of British Columbia, summer after summer. Muriel Wylie Blanchet acted single-handedly as skipper, navigator, engineer and, of course, mother, as she saw her crew through encounters with tides, fog, storms, rapids, cougars and bears. She sharpened in her children a special interest in Haida culture and in nature itself.

This autobiography chronicles Farrar and June Burns travels around the United States and their experience homesteading in the San Juan Islands, teaching Eskimos and traveling across the United States in a covered wagon. She wrote extensively for various periodicals and wrote several books. Burn's autobiography Living High: An Unconventional Autobiography (1941) documents much of her early life story, particularly her time on Sentinel and Waldron Islands in Washington’s San Juan Islands. The book has been republished several times.

June Burn's 1941 classic continues to capture the imagination of readers who long for the adventures that few people will ever have the nerve nor the time to undertake. Courage, gaiety, and a fresh approach to life are reflected in this "unconventional autobiography." It is a story of twentieth-century pioneers as resourceful as ever they were in the days of the old frontier. June Burn and her husband Farrar determined to go their own sweet way, enjoying "first hand living" and not surrendering to the routines of a workaday world. Through the years they had some high and glorious adventures, which included homesteading a "gumdrop" in the San Juan islands of the Pacific Northwest, teaching Eskimos near Siberia, and exploring the United States by donkey cart with a baby aboard.

Folly by Laurie King, a celebrated novelist, based in California. Her recent novel explores the loneliness of a woman in her fifties who has lost her husband and her child. Struggling through mental and emotional illness, she rebuilds her great uncle’s home on fictional Folly Island, just off San Juan Island, in a search for therapy and redemption.