WSDOT quietly broke Bellingham’s I-5 boulder into pieces; it won’t be relocated
Bellingham’s iconic Interstate 5 rock is history.
“They smashed it into 100 pieces,” Keith Cook of Bellingham, who manages the Bellingham Rock page on Facebook, told The Bellingham Herald on Wednesday. “There was no effort whatsoever to maintain its historic value,” Cook said in a phone call from the scene.
Cook went to the site Wednesday afternoon with a person who had considered relocating the rock, which has stood as a community message board for nearly 60 years. He said it had been broken into pieces too small to create a meaningful replacement.
Cook said he was angry, frustrated and disappointed with the Washington State Department of Transportation, which decided that it had to move the 100-ton rock because it’s in the way of a $160 million project to widen three salmon-bearing streams under the freeway along a 6-mile stretch of road in Whatcom and Skagit counties.
“It’s like a murder. It’s not like a broken arm, and they can put it back together. The value of it was in its entirety,” he said.
In a statement sent just before 5 p.m. Wednesday, WSDOT said the rock won’t be relocated.
“WSDOT is developing a process to distribute a limited number of pieces to interested members of the public. Additional details will be shared when plans are finalized,” WSDOT said.
Also Wednesday, WSDOT denied The Herald’s repeated requests to have its reporters watch the rock’s destruction and make photos and video as part of the historical record.
Cook is asking anyone with photos of the rock to share them on Facebook as a final tribute to the rock’s nearly 60-year saga.
Standing about 8 feet high, the massive boulder was blasted out of the surrounding Chuckanut sandstone when I-5 was built in 1966. It sat on the right shoulder of northbound I-5 just north of the Samish Way exit. In 1969, a summer resident of Lake Samish painted its first tag — “Sealth ’70,” a tribute to his Seattle high school graduating class.
In January, it was painted to say “Go Hawks!” in Seattle Seahawks colors, along with the number 12. Its last message was an annual memorial to Jim Robinson and Braden Talbott Lindholdt, both 20, who disappeared while kayaking at Larrabee State Park on March 11, 2001. In between, the rock has been painted with graffiti and messages aimed at lovers, relatives who have died, high school graduates and hundreds of pithy, amusing and sometimes hateful phrases.
“(Destroying the rock) degrades every one of those celebrations — there was a guy who once painted ‘Will you marry me?’ They just decided to negate 60 years of history,” Cook said.
