Now here is a thing you cannot see, because it is gone — and it is gone because they took it somewhere else.
Long before there was a road along this cliff, there was a quarry in it. Eighteen fifty-six, a settler named Henry Roeder opened up the Chuckanut stone quarry over near what is now called Teddy Bear Cove, and started cutting building blocks out of this hillside.
Think about the logistics, because there was no road, no railway, and no town worth the name. The blocks came out of the rock face by hand — drilled, wedged, split along the bedding planes — and then they went straight onto SCHOONERS pulled up at the water's edge below. Sailing ships, loading cut stone off a beach, and carrying it away down the coast.
And that stone went into cities. Chuckanut sandstone ended up in the buildings of Bellingham, and Seattle, and Portland — banks, blocks, courthouses, the solid respectable Victorian architecture a young region put up when it wanted to look permanent. They quarried it, on and off, from eighteen fifty-six until about nineteen hundred and eight.
Now think about what that means. Somewhere in downtown Seattle right now, there is a wall standing that used to be part of the hill on your left. Somebody's grandfather walked past it every day for forty years and never once wondered where it came from.
The quarrying stopped when concrete and steel got cheap, the way these things always stop — not because anybody decided the hill was worth keeping, but because the market moved on.
And here is the part I find quietly satisfying. The stone that was left behind — the hill they did NOT ship away — is the cliff this road is cut into, and the reason you are driving one of the prettiest roads in Washington. The bit they had no use for turned out to be the valuable part.
Fifty million years to make it. Fifty years to cut it up and sail it off. Look at that rock face as you pass and give it a nod.