Clinton rentals for a hiking weekend on South Whidbey

Start with Evergreen Escape

If your trip is built around walking in the woods, book Evergreen Escape I Hot Tub I Sleeps 8 and stop looking. It sits on an acre of evergreens, four bedrooms, eight guests, and the living area looks out into trees rather than at a neighbour's siding. There's a seven-person hot tub, which on Whidbey in the wet months is less a luxury than a drying-out procedure. It's also our most reviewed forest house in Clinton, and the thing guests mention is the quiet.

What makes it work for a hiking group isn't the trees, though. It's the second lounge upstairs and the games room downstairs: ping-pong, arcade cabinets, a game console, free weights and a Peloton. Rain on Whidbey doesn't arrive as drama, it arrives as a grey afternoon that quietly cancels your plans, and a house where eight people can disperse into different rooms is worth more than one with a better view.

It's dog friendly, too, which matters if the walking party has four legs in it.

Where you'd actually walk from a Clinton base

The south end of Whidbey is unusually generous with short forest walks, and almost all of them are a drive of minutes rather than an expedition. A few worth knowing:

• Trustland Trails, at Highway 525 and Craw Road just outside Langley, about two miles up from the Clinton ferry. A gravel forest loop, ADA-compliant, with parking and picnic tables but no restroom. The easiest first walk of a trip, and good with small children.
• Possession Point State Park, at the island's southern tip, roughly a quarter of an hour's drive from the ferry. A loop of about a mile and three-quarters that mixes woodland with a stretch of beach, and the shorebirds are the point.
• Dorothy Cleveland Trail on Possession Road, which climbs hard: close to four hundred feet of gain in under three-quarters of a mile. Short, steep, properly a hike. Nearby, the Hammons Family Farm Preserve offers the opposite, a quarter-mile path through field and wetland.
• Possession Sound Preserve, also at the south end, where a short steep trail drops to a rocky beach with the ferries crossing in front of you.
• Putney Woods off Lone Lake Road near Langley, about twenty minutes from the ferry terminal, hundreds of acres shared by hikers, mountain bikers and horses. This is where you go when an hour isn't enough.
• South Whidbey State Park near Freeland, up 525 and then west on Bush Point Road, which becomes Smugglers Cove. Old-growth western red cedar, Douglas fir and Sitka spruce, with the Wilbert Trail at a bit under two miles round trip and a longer ridge option. Day use only.

Useful for anyone arriving on foot: Island Transit's Route 1 and Route 60 stop at the Clinton ferry terminal and the fares are free, and a southbound Route 1 will put you a few steps from the Trustland trailhead.

The house with its own trail

For four or five people, Quintessa Cottage I Sleeps 4 does something none of the others do: the grounds have ponds, gardens, and a trail running off into the forest with a creek crossing on it. You can walk before coffee without getting in the car, which is a genuinely different rhythm from driving to a trailhead twice a day. Deer graze on the lawn. There's a resident eagle. The deck looks over the gardens to Puget Sound with the Olympics behind.

Two bedrooms, so it suits a couple of friends or a small family rather than a hiking club. It's wheelchair accessible, which is rare in this kind of property, and there's an EV charger. Worth asking us about trail conditions on the creek crossing before you plan around it: it's a working piece of forest, not a groomed path.

When the group outgrows a cottage

Quintessa Cottage shares its grounds with two larger houses, which is the useful thing about the place. Quintessa I Upper House I Sleeps 12 has five bedrooms across three floors with a bathroom on each, a pool table on the lower level and a second kitchen down there too, so a group of twelve isn't queuing for one stove. Mountain views from the upper floors. Reunions and company retreats are what it was set up for, and it reads that way.

Scale up again and there's The Quintessa I Large Groups I Reunions I Retreats, the estate's main house, which sleeps thirty and can be taken together with the cottage. The whole property is the same gardens, ponds and forest edge whichever building you're in.

The other large option sits at the opposite end of the landscape. Maxwelton Farmhouse | Beach Access | Sleeps 18 is a restored 1917 farmhouse on the hill above Maxwelton Beach, split into two self-contained units with their own entrances and kitchens, looking out over Useless Bay, a working farm and the Olympics. It's a farm-and-shoreline house rather than a woodland one, with a wood stove, fire pit and outdoor dining on the deck, and it takes up to two dogs. Maxwelton Road is also how you reach South Whidbey Community Park and the Falcon Trail, a little over a mile north of the highway junction.

Woods in the morning, water in the afternoon

Plenty of groups want both, and south Whidbey is small enough that you don't have to choose. From any of our Clinton houses, Trustland, Possession Point and Putney Woods are all short drives, so a waterfront base costs you nothing in trail access.

Beachfront Access I Pool & Hot Tub I Sleeps 10 is three bedrooms sleeping ten, with a heated pool, a hot tub above the water, two kayaks with paddles and jackets, and a children's playroom. One guest put it plainly: close to the beach and close to the ferry. For families who want the kids occupied between walks, this is the easiest house in the group to spend a whole day in.

Private Beachfront | Hot Tub I Sleeps 10 + Casita adds a fourth bedroom and a casita, three kayaks, a fenced front yard, a fire pit with firewood included, and a five-minute walk to the ferry, which makes it the obvious choice if half your group is coming over from Mukilteo on foot. If you want the biggest kitchen, Beachfront Chateau I Hot Tub I EV Charger I Sleeps 10 has a chef's island, dining for twelve and two living rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows.

Booking it

Book direct with us and you skip the platform fees, and you get a local team on the island rather than a call centre. Tell us the group size, whether anyone's walking on from the ferry, and whether a dog is coming, and we'll tell you which of these houses is free on your dates and which trailhead to start with. Rates, sleeping arrangements and availability are all confirmed live on the property pages.