The Trucks Are Back in Blyn, and They're Not Fixing the Power Lines

If you drove Highway 101 through Blyn this week, you probably saw a bucket truck parked on the shoulder near the casino, a couple of guys up in the branches of a fir tree, spools of wire stacked on the tailgate below. It's easy to assume utility work. It isn't. It's the annual start of one of the largest privately funded light displays in Washington, and the crew doing it has been showing up in Blyn every fall for more than twenty years.

Here's what most people who live nearby never quite clock: the display isn't holiday decor bolted onto a fixed footprint. It's grown, property by property, in step with what the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe has actually built in Blyn and Sequim. If you want a rough sense of how much the tribe's enterprise footprint has expanded over two decades, you can more or less read it off the light count.

What's Actually Going Up This Month

The work belongs to P. Walker Inc., a landscape contracting firm run by Patrick Walker, based in Gig Harbor. His crews have handled the installation every year since the tradition started, and the job is bigger than most people assume. In 2021, an average of eleven employees spent about five weeks on it, starting the second week of October and working ten to eleven hour days, seven days a week, with no days off until the job was done. In earlier years the crew ran smaller, six to ten people, but the schedule was the same grind: every branch of every tree wrapped by hand, one at a time.

Walker has said the technique is the point. His crews don't drape lights over a tree, they wrap every single branch, replicate that across a thirty foot fir, and do it again on the next tree. It's slow work, and it's also why the display reads as solid light rather than scattered strands from the highway.

The switch typically gets flipped in the third or fourth week of November. In the 2025 season it happened November 22, with the display running nightly from dusk until sunrise straight through the New Year. Then comes the quieter part nobody photographs: about three weeks of takedown in January, crews working the same trees in reverse.

A Casino Wall in 2004

The whole thing started with one casino exterior. In 2004, 7 Cedars Resort CEO Jerry Allen saw Christmas lights Walker had strung. He asked who'd done it, tracked down Walker, and paid him $20,000 on the spot to wrap the exterior of the casino, which at that point had no hotel attached to it at all. That was the entire ask: one building, one contractor, one holiday.

It didn't stay that small; the precedent it set became part of the story.

Walker told the Sequim Gazette, "I've had this conversation with the tribe a couple times saying they've set a precedent; they can't ever not do it."

That's the shift worth sitting with. What began as a casino exterior project has become something closer to infrastructure, an annual commitment the tribe now budgets for at roughly half a million dollars a year, according to reporting on the 2025 season.

The Light Count Is a Receipt for the Tribe's Growth

Here's where it gets useful for anyone who's lived in the area a while. Every time the tribe or 7 Cedars adds a building, that building gets added to the lighting map the following winter. The count isn't marketing inflation. It's closer to a physical inventory.

Look at the gaps between rows and you're looking at the tribe's actual construction history. The Cedars at Dungeness golf course got folded into the lighting map after the tribe acquired and renamed it in January 2007, three years after the original casino wrap. The hotel wing joined once it existed. The JCare clinics show up in reporting once those buildings were operating. Even Cedar Greens, the tribe's cannabis retail shop, now gets wrapped, which tells you the display keeps absorbing whatever the tribe opens next, regardless of what kind of building it is.

So when a neighbor mentions the lights "seem bigger this year," they're not imagining it, and they're not just reacting to more bulbs. They're noticing that the tribe added square footage somewhere on that stretch of 101.

The 2025 Season Added Holiday Light Tours

The 2025 season added something new: a $15 per person Holiday Light Tour, departing from the hotel's front entrance, open to the public and not just hotel guests. The ticket includes a small gift and a complimentary drink from Jamestown Java, and a guide walks the group through a brief history at each lit property, including the Railroad Bridge at Dungeness River Nature Center.

That's a meaningful change in framing. For two decades this was described, consistently, as a gift to the community and to travelers passing through. Selling tours turns it into a product with a price tag and a route.

Beth Pratt, executive director of the Sequim-Dungeness Chamber of Commerce, connected the tours directly to a regional tourism strategy aimed at the "shoulder season," the stretch between the area's bigger draws like the Irrigation Festival, Lavender Weekend, and Port Angeles's Crab Fest. In other words, the lights aren't just filling dark winter nights anymore. They're filling a gap on the local tourism calendar that the chamber has been trying to solve for years.

The season also picked up a flip of the switch event on November 22, 2025, with food, live music, and photos with Santa, plus weekly Christmas Movies with Santa on the hotel's newly renovated, heated patio through December. None of that existed when this started as a casino exterior job in 2004.

What You'll Actually See on 101 Before Thanksgiving

If you're driving through regularly over the next couple of months, the pattern tends to hold year to year:

• Crews typically start at the casino itself before working outward to the campus buildings, golf course, and clinics, following the same sequence the display grew in historically.
• Work happens daily, rain included, since the crew is on a fixed five week schedule with no built in weather days.
• The switch flip has landed in the November 22 to 23 window recently, though the exact date shifts, so confirming through 7 Cedars' own channels closer to the date beats guessing.
• Takedown starts right after New Year's and runs about three weeks, which is why the display seems to vanish gradually rather than all at once.

The Part That's Easy to Miss From the Road

Blyn has roughly 100 year round residents. It is not a place built for spectacle. And yet every November it becomes one of the most photographed stretches of highway on the Olympic Peninsula, as the 2004 casino exterior display has grown into an annual tradition.

The next time you slow down on 101 to see whether this year's display looks bigger, you're not just checking out Christmas lights. You're getting a rough read on what the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe built this year. That's a strange thing for a holiday tradition to become, and it's also exactly the kind of detail you only pick up by actually living here long enough to watch it happen more than once.

If you're already home in Sequim, Blyn, or anywhere else on this stretch of the Peninsula and you like this kind of local detail, or you're finally ready to talk about what's next for your own property here, Trisha J Cobb and Shawnna Rigg are always glad to have that conversation. Let's Connect.