By Amy Nesler
San Juan Islands Visitors Bureau
As you are probably aware, tourism is a top economic driver for San Juan County. Visitors “import” new dollars, which benefit small businesses, non-profits like museums and farmers’ markets, and residents as these dollars circulate throughout our island communities. This series of columns will help put faces to this industry – restauranteurs, innkeepers, shopkeepers, tour captains, and other entrepreneurs who make our communities so unique and vibrant.
Amanda Zimlich never thought she’d be an innkeeper. She thought she’d continue life as a corporate chef working for companies like Campbell’s and Cargill until retirement but was burning out. Originally from Seattle, the San Juans have always been a magical retreat for her—as a kid she visited Orcas in the summers with the family, and as a teen, she basically “grew up” at Camp Orkila, paddling the Islands and becoming obsessed with the natural beauty and magic unique to these Islands. In 2019 when she purchased Otters Pond Bed & Breakfast from the prior owners who were retiring, it just felt like a promising and satisfying solution.
At the Pond, she says, “I get to cook for guests and make them happy, raise chickens in my garden, only answer to myself, and feed birds for a living. It’s dreamy. I love visitors’ stories and what they share with me and the other guests—our breakfast conversations are often highly entertaining. It is very much like living on a Hallmark movie set—I get to watch love stories play out. Living here, I have grown to love the responsibility of teaching new visitors to tread lightly and take care of this special place—it is rewarding to see the joy when someone else experiences that something special they feel when discovering Cascade Falls for the first time, or they soak in an impossibly lavender-sienna North Beach sunset for the first time.”
How does tourism benefit the Islands?
Zimlich says, “I believe tourism is uniquely important in the San Juans as it is an opportunity to educate people from many different socioeconomic backgrounds on the importance of sustainability and preservation of our delicate ecosystem- the magic of this unique place, and its accessibility, make it an opportunity to tell the story of the importance of protecting the environment each one of us holds. These islands show us almost immediately the impact just a small footprint can have, as the ecosystem here is so fragile and reactive. I believe it is therefore our responsibility to show visitors this by turning it around into a lesson on how to preserve, protect and help the environment thrive.”
Taking lemons from the pandemic that nobody predicted, and turning them into lemonade, is not only a survival story, but one Amanda is proud to tell folks because “I learned so much about my own integrity and tenacity, working through it all for such a long time. I look back at that chaotic time and appreciate that despite its ugliness, it brought me closer to my neighbors and community, and taught me how to build alliances with other island businesses in a way that may or may not have taken shape—the connections made certainly would have taken longer to discover their usefulness.” This sense of community described by Zimlich has helped us through uncharted waters before and will get us through again.
