Walk out to the Tennant Lake trailhead some morning after Labor Day and you'll find the same sign that goes up every year around this time, taped near the base of the viewing tower behind the Fragrance Garden. It explains that the marsh boardwalk is closed for the season. A lot of people read that sign, assume the whole park just shut down for winter, and turn back toward the parking lot.
That assumption costs them a walk. The boardwalk closing is real. The rest of the story, the part the sign doesn't spell out, is that the closed section is a small fraction of what's actually out there, and the part that stays open all fall and winter happens to be the part most dog owners were already using anyway.
What the sign actually means
The Tennant Lake Marsh Boardwalk is a half-mile loop on elevated decking that winds over shallow water and through the peat-bog marsh behind the Fragrance Garden, with some of the older, slicker boards replaced in sections with composite material for better footing. It closes every year during waterfowl hunting season, which runs September through March, and Whatcom County posts closure notices both at the park and on its Hovander Homestead Park webpage each fall.
Here's the detail that changes the calculus for anyone walking a dog: the boardwalk was never open to dogs in the first place. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, which co-manages the Tennant Lake unit alongside Whatcom County, prohibits dogs on the boardwalk year-round, closure or no closure. So the September shutdown doesn't take anything away from dog owners. It never was their trail to lose.
What the closure actually does is redirect human foot traffic, and it redirects it into territory that was arguably the better walk all along.
The math nobody does at the trailhead
The boardwalk sits inside a connected trail network, not as a standalone loop. A half-mile connector links Tennant Lake directly to Hovander Homestead Park next door, and from there the Nooksack River Trail runs 1.9 miles along the riverbank, curving around the old homestead site on level, easy gravel.
| Trail segment | Length | Open in fall and winter? |
|---|---|---|
| Tennant Lake Marsh Boardwalk | 0.5 mi | No, closed September through March |
| Tennant Lake to Hovander connector | 0.5 mi | Yes |
| Nooksack River Trail at Hovander | 1.9 mi | Yes |
Add those three segments together and you get roughly 2.9 miles of connected trail radiating out from that one trailhead. The piece that closes for the season is about half a mile of it, or right around one-sixth of the total mileage. Put another way, more than four out of every five trail miles in this system stay open the entire time the boardwalk sign is up.
The 624-acre Tennant Lake unit itself doesn't close either. The viewing tower, the interpretive center, and the fragrance garden all keep running through the fall and winter months. What closes is specifically the elevated walkway over the marsh, which happens to be the shortest piece of the loop.
Where the walk actually goes this fall
Once the connector trail carries you from Tennant Lake into Hovander Homestead Park, the park does most of the work of making the redirect feel like an upgrade rather than a consolation. Hovander has an off-leash dog area, a playground, a riverbank with broad gravel pathways, and picnic areas that stay in use through the fall.
The centerpiece is the Hovander House itself, a six-room farmhouse built in 1903 by Hokan Hovander, a Swedish immigrant who designed the home for his family after settling in Ferndale, and the property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The barn beside it is one of the largest wood barns in the county. None of that closes when the marsh does.
For birders specifically, the redirect barely registers as a loss. The Tennant Lake unit has recorded more than 150 bird species across the lake, the swamp and marsh areas, and the surrounding floodplain, and most of that habitat is visible from the tower and the open trail segments without ever setting foot on the boardwalk. Waterfowl hunting on the unit is restricted to three designated blinds on the lake itself, well away from the walking trails, which is part of why the county and WDFW can keep the rest of the park open to foot traffic during hunting season in the first place.
Parking for Tennant Lake and the Fragrance Garden is free, off Nielsen Road, and managed by Whatcom County Parks. Both Hovander and Tennant Lake keep the same daily hours, 8 a.m. to sunset, with gates locked at night.
After the walk
Ferndale's small commercial cluster near the park makes it easy to turn a fall walk into a full morning without driving far. Twin Sisters Creamery, the family-run cheese shop on Portal Way, is a short drive away for anyone who wants something to bring home after the loop. Griffintown Cozy Corner Books & Coffee on 2nd Avenue gives walkers a place to sit down with a coffee and a book once the marsh air turns cold. FringE Brewing, Ferndale's only craft brewery and one that welcomes leashed dogs in its taproom, covers the later end of the day for anyone extending the outing into the afternoon, and Bella Boutique & Consignment on Main Street is worth a stop for anyone browsing downtown while they're already out.
None of that changes because a half-mile of boardwalk closed for the season. If anything, the closure is a decent excuse to notice the rest of the park, the parts that were open the whole time.
The season isn't over. It moved half a mile.
The Tennant Lake boardwalk sign tells the truth about one loop. It doesn't tell you that the loop was never the whole story, or that the trail you'll actually walk this fall, the river path through Hovander, the connector, the off-leash stretch, was open to you and your dog before the sign ever went up. The marsh takes its rest through the winter. The rest of the park keeps working.
If you're a longtime Ferndale walker figuring out your fall routine, or you're new to the neighborhood and still learning where the good trails are, Chris Boyd knows this stretch of Whatcom County well enough to talk through more than trail maps. Schedule a personalized consultation whenever a Ferndale conversation turns from a walk in the park to a decision about a home.
