Bodelteh Island is an island off of the western shore of the Olympic Peninsula of the state of Washington. Bodelteh Island, and the attendant smaller islands and rocks around it, is the westernmost point of the state of Washington, and therefore the most westerly point in the coterminous United States. It is a little north of Ozette Island, and both of them, together with a great deal of rocks, are part of the Flattery Rocks National Wildlife Refuge.
Bodelteh Island is about a mile west of Cape Alava, itself the westernmost piece of land connected to the continent. The island itself is about a thousand feet by two hundred feet, and is either one or two islands depending on whether the tide is in or out. It is closed to the public due to the sensitivity of the shorebird population and other wildlife that lives there. Even by the standards of the Olympic peninsula, Bodelteh Island seems to be a hard place to reach.
While researching the island, I found two surprising dearths: first, the dearth of information about Bodelteh Island. Although its small size and lack of accessibility might make it understandably not a well-known place, I would think there would be more written on it due to its unique location. However, even on the internet, usually a cornucopia of information, there seems to to be little written about it. Google Maps doesn't even list its name. The second dearth, which I was also surprised about, is the lack of islands along the Pacific Coast. Although I have spent a great deal of time thinking about Northwest geography, until I sat down to look, I never realized that between the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco and Cape Flattery, at the end of the Pacific coast of Washington state, Bodelteh Island (and Ozette and the other surrounding islets) is the only island. While the Puget Sound has a confusing array of islands, Bodelteh Island, a small uninhabited piece of land that could be walked across in ten minutes, is the only island that the entire coast of Washington and Oregon have. Given the overall grandeur of the Pacific Northwest coast, this is a disappointing oversight on the part of geography.