Vashon Adventures passes the torch

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 22, 2026

After more than a decade of getting islanders and visitors alike onto the water, onto bikes and into the woods, Erin Kieper and her husband Doug Kieper are stepping back from Vashon Adventures — and making sure everything they built continues without them.

“Our big thing was we didn’t want it to go away,” Erin said.

It won’t. The couple spent the off-season quietly orchestrating a handoff that keeps every piece of the operation intact.

The Vashon Park District will resume management of kayak and paddleboard rentals at Jensen Point, along with paddle-in or bike-in campsites at Lisabeula and Point Robinson. Camp on Vashon, helmed by islander Alyssa O’Sullivan of Sweet Alyssum Farm, will take over the seven campsites at Maury Island Marine Park under a contract with King County Parks.

“There were a couple of outfitters around the region who would have been interested in having an outpost on Vashon,” Erin said. “Our first priority was trying to get the park district to take it back — keep it local, keep it accessible.”

The transition is designed to be seamless to the people who show up every Memorial Day weekend ready to get on the water.

The Kiepers didn’t set out to run an outdoor recreation business. In 2012, she and her husband spotted an opportunity when the Vashon Park District put out a call for ideas to help ease a financial crunch.

The couple bought the district’s equipment fleet, took on concession status and started running kayak and paddleboard rentals out of the boathouse at Jensen Point.

“We hired island kids, just young people, high school and college age, and we worked on weekends,” she said. “It was always fun, though.”

A few years in, Erin took a sabbatical from her career at Swedish Medical Center and threw herself into expanding the business. She started courting corporate groups and looking for ways to broaden the customer base — and quickly learned something useful about what visitors to Vashon actually wanted.

“People wanted inexpensive places to stay on the island, and some people are afraid of water,” she said. “So they wanted a land activity to go with it.”

That insight spawned Vashon E-Bike, a fleet of pedal-assist electric bikes eventually based out of a shop in Vashon Village.

Camping partnerships with both the park district and King County followed, adding sites at Lisabeula, Point Robinson and Maury Island Marine Park. A glamping stint came and went. The pandemic, counterintuitively, was a strong period — the business was well-suited to keeping people outside and socially distanced.

To reflect how much the operation had grown, the Kiepers rebranded under the name Vashon Adventures.

What started with two paddleboards and a handful of kayaks grew into a fleet large enough to put 65 people on the water at once.

Not everything survived. Two years ago, a 400 percent insurance rate hike — driven by industry-wide liability concerns around e-bikes — forced the Kiepers to sell off their entire bicycle fleet and shut that piece of the business down. They also wound down glamping. By last summer, they had streamlined to camping and water sports.

But even a streamlined version of Vashon Adventures is a seven-days-a-week, Memorial Day to Labor Day commitment. With grandchildren in Ohio, aging parents and a van outfitted for adventure travel, Erin said the calculus finally shifted.

“Last year, my whole goal was just not to get hurt,” she said. “Moving kayaks is no longer fun for me.”

She is quick to say the decision wasn’t about burning out on the mission — it was about completing it.

Over the years, Vashon Adventures partnered with the Vashon Nature Center on kelp surveys, took out the high school marine club at the end of each school year, hosted senior center paddle days and introduced countless visitors from landlocked places to jellyfish and seals.

“My highlight was watching people do it, getting outside and trying something new,” Erin said. “Seeing seals for the first time. People visiting from wherever that don’t have salt water.”

She described the paddling at Jensen Point as “adventures with training wheels” — a protected harbor, calm water, perfect for families returning summer after summer. Meanwhile, the island teenagers she first hired to run the operation grew up too. Some have since gotten married and started families of their own.

The park district is still in the process of hiring staff and finalizing its operating schedule. Erin expects hours to be scaled back from the seven-day-a-week model she ran, at least at first.

She’s been helping with the transition and plans to show up to help clean boats before the season starts. After that, she’s letting go.

The family adventure van is fueled up. A Utah trip is on the calendar. And after 13 summers of helping everyone else have fun on the water, Erin and Doug are ready for some of their own.

“If we don’t do it now,” she said, “we’re gonna get too old.”