If you asked ten people on Camano Island what's going on at Cama Beach Historical State Park, most would give you the same answer: the cabins closed a couple years back, shame about that, but the park's still there. That answer is true and also two years out of date. The cabins closing in 2024 is the oldest news at Cama Beach, not the current news. Since then the park has absorbed a seawall collapse and a septic failure, and the thing most people assume survived the cabin closure, the wooden boat rentals, didn't.
The gap between what residents think is closed and what's actually closed is worth sorting out before your next beach walk, brunch reservation, or trip down to the water with out-of-town guests.
The closure everyone already knows about
The cabins are gone, and they're not coming back where they were. In October 2024 the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission voted to permanently close the 33 waterfront cabins that had stood since 1934, when LeRoy Stradley first opened the fishing resort. The vote followed a February 2024 septic failure that forced an abrupt closure, and a public comment period that drew more than 185 written comments and a petition with about 1,500 signatures asking the commission to reopen them. It didn't happen. Between the cost of fixing decades-old infrastructure, a seawall that needed strengthening against king tides, and the site's documented cultural sensitivity, staff recommended permanent closure and the commission agreed.
Cama Beach Cafe owner Chad Allen told commissioners the closure was already hitting his business hard, since weddings, events, and overnight guests had been a meaningful share of his traffic. That's two years old now. Here's what's happened since, and what most people haven't clocked yet.
The one almost nobody's tracking: a seawall gave out in January
In January 2026, a king tide lined up with high wind and wave conditions and took out roughly a 20-foot section of the park's aging seawall. Seawater started breaching into the interior sections of the remaining wall and beach, and the flooding damaged the boathouse. State Parks staff installed oversized sandbags as an emergency stabilization measure and started monitoring the wall daily. The lower part of the park, including the historic cabin area, has been closed to public access since, not because of the 2024 decision, but because of storm damage that happened more than a year after that decision was already made.
This matters for anyone who assumed "the lower beach is closed" meant one static thing. It's now closed for two overlapping reasons stacked on top of each other, and the newer one is a live infrastructure risk the park is actively managing rather than a policy decision that's settled.
The newest closure: a septic failure in July
On July 19, 2026, the park's aging septic system failed again, this time at the Vault 3 lift station located upland above the Cama Center. The corrosion and maintenance issues behind it aren't new; they're the same category of failure that triggered the original cabin closure back in 2024. What's new is the practical effect on a visit today: the bathroom facilities at the drop-off shelter near parking lot C are closed until further notice, with portable toilets standing in at lot C, lot A near the Cama Center, and the beach area.
If you're planning a longer visit with kids or older relatives, that's the detail that changes your afternoon. It's a small thing next to a seawall collapse, but it's also the most recent change, confirmed as still in effect as of early September 2026, which makes it more relevant to a visit this month than anything from 2024.
The wooden boats didn't survive the cabin closure either
Here's the correction most locals need. The Center for Wooden Boats operated a rental outpost at Cama Beach for years, alongside its flagship Lake Union location in Seattle, offering rowboats, sailboats, and the kind of hands-on maritime programming that made the park feel alive beyond the cabins themselves. Some tourism write-ups still describe it as an active rental center at Cama Beach. It isn't. The Cama Beach location has been out of operation since October 2024, tied to the same park infrastructure issues that closed the cabins, and the January 2026 boathouse flooding didn't help. If you want the wooden boat experience, that program now lives at the Center for Wooden Boats' Lake Union campus in Seattle, not on Camano Island.
This is the kind of detail that's easy to get wrong because the sources disagree with each other. Some explain the park as if the boat rentals are business as usual. They aren't. If you're the kind of resident who occasionally checks a place's status page before driving out, this is the one worth double checking, because half the internet hasn't caught up.
What's actually open, and worth using
Strip away the parts that are closed and there's still a real park here. Day use runs 8 a.m. to dusk year round with a Discover Pass, and none of the 2026 closures touch that. The Cama Beach Cafe is open daily from mid-June through Labor Day and weekends only the rest of the year, serving breakfast and lunch out of the lodge with views over Saratoga Passage toward Whidbey Island, the kind of spot where you might spot an orca or a gray whale from your table if the timing's right. The welcome center is on its summer schedule through early fall, open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The trail network is untouched by any of this. Up to 15 miles of trail wind through the park's upper reaches, and a mile-long connector trail links Cama Beach directly to Camano Island State Park, so a single Discover Pass covers a longer loop than most visitors realize. Picnic tables are scattered through the park on a first-come basis, and the historic buildings above the closed beach area, the vintage gas pumps and interpretive displays telling the story of the Risk family's resort era, are still there to walk past even if you can't get down to the water itself.
None of this requires the shuttle, which has been suspended since the original 2024 closures and hasn't resumed. Parking is ample enough at the upper lots that most visitors don't miss it, but it's worth knowing before you arrive expecting a ride down.
Why this is worth sorting out now
Cama Beach isn't a place that changes status once and stays that way. It's had three distinct closures layered on top of each other over two years, each with a different cause and a different timeline, and the oldest one is the one everyone still talks about. If you're planning a fall walk, a brunch reservation, or a visit with someone who hasn't been since before 2024, the honest answer to "is Cama Beach open" is yes, with three specific carve outs that have nothing to do with each other.
That kind of layered, evolving status is common to a lot of the infrastructure that shapes daily life on Camano Island, from county road projects to shoreline permitting. Understanding how a place actually functions today, not how it's remembered from a few years back, is part of what makes living here different from visiting here.
If you're weighing a move to Camano Island, or thinking about what your own property near the water might be worth given how seriously the state is treating shoreline erosion at parks like this one, the team at Pilchard Properties knows this stretch of Snohomish County block by block. Reach out for an instant home valuation, and let's talk about what's actually happening with your home's value, not what the market looked like two years ago.
