The American Town You Can Only Reach Through Canada

Point Roberts, Washington, sits at the southern tip of a peninsula that dips just below the 49th parallel — the line the US and Britain drew in 1846 to divide the Pacific Northwest. The peninsula belongs to British Columbia. The bottom five square miles do not.

To drive from Point Roberts to Bellingham, the nearest sizable American city, you cross into Canada at the Peace Arch crossing, drive 25 miles through Surrey and Langley, and re-enter the US at Blaine. Two passport checks, each way, for a grocery run.

About 1,300 people live there full-time. The town has a fire station, a post office (ZIP code 98281), a small marina, and until recently a pharmacy — though the pharmacy closed in 2020. Residents who need a hospital go through Canada to get to one in the United States.

The anomaly is pure geometry. When diplomats settled on 49°N as the border, nobody checked whether landmasses straddled it cleanly. Point Roberts does not. The same problem created two other American points isolated by the border: the Northwest Angle in Minnesota, accessible by land only through Manitoba, and Elm Point, a tiny spit accessible only by water. Point Roberts is by far the largest of the three.

During COVID-19 border closures in 2020 and 2021, residents faced genuine hardship. Supply deliveries from US companies stopped. Amazon refused to ship there. The peninsula became, briefly, a demonstration of how arbitrary the border really is when enforced.