Between Trail & Tide with Rowan Hinds & Andrew Gardner
There’s no road to Salmon Beach.
Beneath leaning madronas and down more than 200 wooden steps, you’ll find a place few outsiders know: a tight-knit waterfront community pressed between a towering bluff and the restless tides of the Tacoma Narrows. Here, from time immemorial, Coast Salish fishermen have gathered herring from the current with hand-carved rakes, an ingenuity that still echoes today.
In this episode, we follow high school filmmaker Rowan Hinds and anthropologist Andrew Gardner down the hill and into Salmon Beach, an off-grid neighborhood where 81 stilted cabins, patched rafts and weathered decks sway above the Salish Sea. Oars splash in rowboat races cheered by a homegrown marching band. Forks clink at potluck dinners stretched across long communal tables.
“Beachers,” as they call themselves, are bound by interdependence, adaptation and storytelling. Rowan grew up here; Andrew arrived later as an adult. Together they trace the evolution of early 19th-century fishing shacks into the community we see today, shaped by strict zoning, erosion and decades of environmental regulation. Plumbing only arrived in the 1980s. Even now, there is still no road in. Yet generations have raised their children in tide-washed cabins along this same shoreline, a place that is both sanctuary and proving ground.
Step carefully between the hand-built houses or swim between them and you will hear stories rise like sea mist: cannon feuds, chainsaw diplomacy, creaking boards, landslides, potbellied stoves blown apart by cigarettes. These tales, gathered from Rowan’s short film Down the Hill and Andrew’s Salmon Beach Oral History Project, include the voices of Roger Edwards, Jean Kerrick, Marilyn Mahoney, Ed Quigley, Galen Turner and Richard Turner.
Here, memory is tidal. It returns again and again, settling into the wood, the shoreline and the people who call it home despite all odds. And when you climb back up the hill, you will carry an indelible portrait of a community carved into the rugged edge of the Pacific Northwest.
We record on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples at the Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle’s University District.
The views expressed in this podcast series are those of the guests and reflect their personal lived experiences. Power of Place presents oral histories with real people, and while some opinions may be controversial, they are shared as authentic expressions that honor the complexity of place. Conversations are edited for length and clarity, but otherwise remain unedited to preserve context and substance. Listener discretion is advised.
For more insight into life at Salmon Beach, explore:
“I regard almost every single person on Salmon Beach as my neighbor. I would even go as far to say as family because, as the saying goes, you can’t choose your family; but you can choose your friends and you can’t really choose who you live with at Salmon Beach. So, in that way, they become family.”
