Day 7 · Scheduled earlier
Bertelsen Winery
Starbird Road, Mount Vernon, WA
Across to southern Skagit County
This day on the route
- Planned date
- The day
- Walking
- Planned walking
- 15.1 miles
Day 7: 15.1 planned walking miles to the Bertelsen Winery area on Starbird Road. No business-hosted activity or terrain guarantee is announced.
Route overview, not turn-by-turn directions.
The planned 15.1-mile stage ends at Bertelsen Winery on Starbird Road. The family-owned winery opened in 2014 on a hillside in southern Skagit County.
Day 7 connects Arlington with the Bertelsen Winery anchor in southern Skagit County. At 15.1 planned walking miles, it is one of the longer stages in this northern section.
Bertelsen Winery describes itself as a family-owned business on a hillside in southern Skagit County. It opened to the public on May 1, 2014, and gives its address as 20598 Starbird Road. Its wines come from Washington vineyards. The hillside setting places this anchor above the surrounding lowland landscape.
From this part of Skagit County, the next planned walking leg continues 8.6 miles to Mount Vernon, followed by an Awareness Day. The sequence carries the walk from the hillside anchor into the river city, with an educational pause before the route turns toward the Chuckanut coast.
From the road
Rain for the first time, and a man who stopped to ask if she was all right
It rained on her for the first time. Not heavily — but it had come down all night, and she walked the whole day in rain gear with a cover over the pack. She was especially glad of the Van Dams that morning: an early start, a breakfast with a great deal of protein in it, and Becky dropping her back on the route at half past nine. It was Becky who suggested the Skagit Valley Food Co-op as a place to find a bed in Mount Vernon.
Seven and seven-tenths of a mile took her to the Skagit Valley Food Co-op in Mount Vernon, with a few more still to go into the middle of town. Somewhere along the way she worked out that she is now closer to the Canadian border than she is to Seattle.
A couple at the co-op saw the pack and asked what she was doing. She told them about enrolling donors, and about Jada, and that she relies on other people’s generosity for her food and her bed. They told her to go and get something to eat and they would pay for it. She had a hot meal out of it, which after a wet morning is not nothing.
The thing she wanted written down happened about halfway through the day. She was crossing an overpass, heading for the old Highway 99, when an old Chevy truck pulled up on the far side of the road. She walked over to it. The man behind the wheel wanted to know whether she was all right — that was the whole of it. There was a young black labrador on the seat beside him. She told him what she was doing and that she was fine, and he smiled and told her she would be going to heaven, and drove on.
Nobody at the co-op was able to put her up, and the places she rang had nothing either. She was walking towards a Methodist church she had found on a map when she passed St. Joseph Catholic Church in the middle of its evening mass. She waited for the end of it, and asked Father Carlos whether there was room for a tent. He said there was.
I was deeply moved by his simply taking the time to be sure a fellow citizen was okay.
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NMDP — Join the registry · checked Sep 1, 2026
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Sponsoring a mile, a day or a stop is a way of describing a gift to the Jada Bascom Foundation. It does not purchase anything on the route.
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Sources
Local history and background reading for this stop.
- About Bertelsen Winery — checked Sep 5, 2026
