I-5 Bellingham Rock pieces available for pickup July 11

The Bellingham Rock, once big enough to be a billboard, is now souvenir-size as its storied saga draws to a close.

On Saturday, the Washington State Department of Transportation will hand out pieces of the Bellingham Rock averaging 3 inches in size for free at the Civic Stadium parking lot in Bellingham.

Since April, the painted landmark has gone from a more than 100-ton boulder on the side of northbound Interstate 5 just outside of Lake Samish to a pile of dozens of chunks after WSDOT broke it up to make way for a fish passage restoration project, and now to a collection of more than 1,000 pieces.

Over decades, visitors to the Bellingham Rock painted messages celebrating sports wins, memorializing loved ones and commemorating big life moments. Keith Cook, reluctant "voice of the rock," runs a Facebook page that has documented the rock's messages for about 20 years.

WSDOT will hand out the pieces, one per person, from 9 a.m. until as late as 3 p.m. or until all the pieces have been given away. They will be given away on a first-come, first-served basis. After 2 p.m., people can begin picking up more than one.

You'll just have to fill out an online waiver by 12 p.m. Friday, but know that it's not a guarantee to get a piece.

While it might be fun to take a piece of Bellingham history home, it wasn't the hope for many that a rehomed Bellingham Rock would be pocket-size.

WSDOT estimated that crews could break it into about four or five pieces. Frank Youngblood, a local private landowner, had planned to reassemble the chunks on his property for the public to view, but when he saw the state of the rock after WSDOT crews broke it apart, he decided it was impossible.

Crews had stripped away its layers of paint, drilled into it and inserted expanding grout to crack the rock apart. It was in about 40 pieces when Youngblood came to check on it in May.

When you take a piece of the Bellingham Rock home, you're taking a small part of countless Bellingham stories - the marriage proposal of one couple painted there in 1985. Twenty years of messages painted by two parents on the anniversary of their two sons' disappearance while kayaking in 2001.

Youngblood said he could peel the layers of paint off the pieces of the rock like pages in a book.

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This story was originally published July 7, 2026 at 9:41 AM.