Clearidge, Anacortes: A West Side Neighborhood You Have Probably Driven Past

Clearidge is on the west side of Anacortes, on the hill above Ship Harbor and the ferry terminal, in the stretch between the west end of Oakes Avenue and Anaco Beach Road. The Anacortes Airport is close by. If you drive from downtown toward the ferry on Oakes Avenue and turn uphill at the roundabout onto Glasgow Way, you are in it. The association, the City park, and the county plat all spell it Clearidge; you will see it written Clearridge around town too, and I have kept that spelling in the web address so you can find this page either way.

Two of the neighborhoods on my list, Navigator and Mariners, sit on this same hill, on Navigator Lane and Mariners Place, but on the county's books they are a different plat of a different era: the Reserve at Channel Landing, recorded in 2014, beside the San Juan Passage plats of 2008 to 2014 on Cutter Drive, Clipper Drive, and Edwards Way. I have kept them as their own pages because that is how people name them, but on a map they are neighbors, and the honest way to compare them is to walk all three in one afternoon.

Oakes Avenue takes you east to 12th Street, downtown Anacortes, and Commercial Avenue, and west to the Washington State Ferries terminal at Ship Harbor for Lopez, Shaw, Orcas, and San Juan islands. Oakes, 12th Street, and Commercial Avenue are the state highway spur, so they are also the road to Highway 20 and the mainland. The Guemes Channel Trail runs along the waterfront below the neighborhood from the Edwards Way cul-de-sac about a mile toward town, and the Ship Harbor Interpretive Preserve, with its wetlands and 2,000 feet of sandy beach, sits between the ferry terminal and the homes near Edwards Way.

Clearidge Park, in the 1900 block of Blakely, is the neighborhood park: two tennis courts, pickleball, and a basketball court on 0.8 acre. The Anacortes School District serves the city, and it is a non-boundary district: the district itself assigns each elementary student to Fidalgo, Island View, or Mount Erie on class size, sibling placement, parent preference, and transportation, not on street address, and sends the assignment by email in the summer. Anacortes Middle School, Anacortes High School, and Cap Sante High School serve the whole city, so no address on this page comes with a guaranteed elementary school, and I do not pretend otherwise.

By the road from the middle of Clearridge, it is 1.1 miles to the Anacortes ferry terminal, 2.8 to 10th and Commercial, 20 to the Burlington I-5 exit, 43 to downtown Bellingham. These are road miles from OpenStreetMap routing, measured September 2026, by road and not by ferry.