Gravel Beach

Clinton

2012-01-19T21:14:00.001-08:00

The eastern shore of southern Whidbey Island forms a well-defined drift cell with the dominant southerly storms and waves transporting sediment northward. The cell originates at Possession Head at the south end of the island and terminates at Sandy Point, near Langley. The abundant sandy sediment has led to the development of long spits parallel to base of the high bluffs. One of these lies just north of Possession Head (Possession County Park lies at its southern end). Another is Columbia Beach, the long low strip of land lined with waterfront homes that you see from ferry as you approach the Clinton terminal.

North of the ferry dock, the shoreline bends slightly westward and another barrier beach emerges, forming Randall Point, Brighton Beach, and Camper's Row along Hastings Road (aerial view). The original spit must have fizzled out along here somewhere, but ingenuity and some earth-moving equipment (perhaps just a big hose) filled the narrow strip of low beach berm and wetlands to create a wide enough platform on which to build cabins.

It makes for a neat neighborhood, but a geologically hazardous one, as homes are tucked into the base of steep slopes that periodically fail during heavy rain storms. Elliott, my guide today, recalls living in one that got hit by a slide several decades ago. Some owners have built walls to block or divert possible mud and debris. In addition, a couple of steep stream gullies also empty onto this beach, their lowermost reaches in pipes and channels that would be challenged by a large debris flow or a flash flood.

I have no trouble seeing the appeal of these places, but the geologist in me can't help but shake my head. I doubt I'd sleep comfortably during rainy spells.

For more on the history of this community and a wonderful sense of what draws people to these places, look for Frances Wood's Down to Camp: A History of Summer Folk on Whidbey Island.

AERIAL VIEW

Golden Gardens

2012-01-19T21:14:00.000-08:00

This time of year, the highest tides arrive right around sunrise. A couple of days after Christmas I headed out early to Golden Gardens to see the effect of the month's highest water levels. The predicted high tide was 12.7' above MLLW (Mean Lower Low Water or a "0" tide). According to the Seattle tide gauge, the actual water level may have come in a couple inches higher. These photos were taken 15-30 minutes after the peak tide.

This is not an unusually high tide. A 13' tide (these numbers hold for central Puget Sound, but would need to be adjusted for other areas) occurs an average of 7-8 times a year, although the annual variability is huge. Some years never see a 13' tide at all. And in El Nino years, we may get 20 or 30! (Alki Beach: January 2010).

The number of high tides at progressively higher levels falls off quickly. In Seattle, Mean Higher High Water (the average of the highest high for every day of the year) is 11.35' - and we can expect a couple hundred every year. As noted, 13' tides average less than 8 times a year. And 14' tides take extraordinary conditions: either a strong El Nino, like January 2010, or a big storm with a strong surge (February, 2006). Seattle's highest high tide was 14.5' and occurred on January 27, 1983 (another El Nino year).

In these photos at Golden Gardens, we see that the still water level is probably a foot or so below the sandy berm, but that the runup of the waves is just enough to send water over the berm crest. Berm elevations vary and can depend on wave exposure and the abundance of gravel, among other factors, but 2' above MHHW is often a good place to start.

More on Golden Gardens:
Golden Gardens: July, 2011

Bay View

2012-01-19T21:13:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to catch up with some posts started in December.

The original shoreline here consisted of a low bluff, a narrow beach, and the endless tidal flats of Padilla Bay. Development involved building a rectangular fill jutting out into the bay, using sediment dredged out from under the eelgrass on the flats. No, they couldn't get permits to do that today! The aerial image (see link below) shows the artificial geometry of this piece of the world.

The north and south ends are marked by riprap walls, which are extended out into the bay to act as terminal groins for the artificial beach that lies on the western shore of the feature. Two more intermediate rock groins apparently help control the beach's shape - although I'm not sure how much they add.

The original beach was built of imported sand and gravel - the material in the tide flats is too fine - and was renourished as the beach gradually eroded back into the artificial fill. There is no sediment in the corner south of the fill, but a very nice little pocket beach has formed on the north side. Some of this sediment may have come from the eroding bluffs to the north - while some may have leaked around the northern groin from the nourished beach.

I have only heard rumors of the plans for fixing this beach -- but I admit I'm still not clear what's broken that a fairly small amount of work and additional sediment couldn't solve.

AERIAL VIEW

Ala Spit

2011-12-15T20:56:00.000-08:00

Waves are introduced early in oceanography and coastal geomorphology books, since they are a fundamental way by which energy moves through water and by which water moves sediment. One of the most important aspects of waves is their behavior as they reach shore - and terms like reflection, refraction, and diffraction are important concepts, but often misapplied words. There were some nice examples in the little tiny waves at Ala Spit in Monday's low early morning light.

Reflection is the simplest notion, in part because we can all relate to other examples in day to day life - like billiard balls, canyon echoes, and shiny countertops. Here, waves are striking a vertical wall at about 45 degrees. The reflected waves leave the wall at the same angle, creating a mesh of intersecting waves. Where the wave peaks cross, their heights add, doubling the height of the individual waves. This photo also shows how the small waves steepen and grow in height as they arrive in shallow water. One of the most dramatic examples of wave reflection here in the Sound is the havoc on the south side of the Hood Canal Bridge during a strong south wind (Shine, January 2007).

This second picture illustrates both diffraction and refraction (though tough to separate here), as waves wrap around the small bar (and diffract from its ends). Diffraction seems to be the hardest concept to pin down and takes me back to college physics labs, the diffraction of microwaves through narrow slits, and the relevance to the wave-particle character of electromagnetic energy. Refraction is the bending of waves that occurs as waves slow down in shallower water and is an incredibly important concept to coastal geomorphologists and to surfers (these avocations frequently overlap). Reflection also reappears in this photo, since there are a series of waves reaching the far side of the bar that have reflected off of the log in the distance.

AERIAL/MAP VIEW

Ala Spit

2011-12-13T21:32:00.000-08:00

A lesson in overwash. The frost on this chilly morning highlighted the beautiful overwash fans from past storms, when waves and high tides spilled gravel over the top of the berm and into the backshore. Some of these probably go back many years or decades; others are brand new.

Since my visit last month (November 11) waves have washed over the newly constructed berm, depositing much of the sand and gravel on the back side of the narrow neck of the spit. The crest of the berm through this area is now only slightly above Mean Higher High Water so this winter's spring highs will continue to flood over the top. The beach face is flat and littered with scattered large cobbles and small boulders and occasional chunks of concrete that were left from the old riprap. The large wood that was placed along the temporary berm has largely washed out.

There are some good photos of the tide washing across the spit in the December 5th Whidbey News-Times.

Restoring nature isn't just about removing man made structures and replanting native vegetation; it's also about restoring the physical conditions that created and maintained the landscape in the first place. This means allowing storms and erosion and natural disturbances back into the picture - the very things we often go to such great lengths to control. The trouble is that these dynamic processes are difficult to predict and a site that has been altered for a long period of time will only return to its original condition slowly, and even then, is not likely to return in its original position.

Recovery of the berm will take time and it will take sediment. The first will require patience. The latter will be a challenge, as the neck of this spit is short on sand (and particularly gravel, since this is what best builds robust berms). The foreshore appears to have been starved of sand and gravel due to the development of a bar or proto-spit just to the south. There are also human modifications, including an updrift groin, that complicate the picture. In an ideal world, these other structures might have been removed and perhaps more gravel might have been added to the foreshore to help jump-start a new berm.

I look forward to watching what happens. Meanwhile, I trust that folks walking on the spit will take care to head back to their cars before high tide - lest their feet or their dog gets wet.

AERIAL/MAP VIEW

Bush Point

2011-11-12T09:19:00.001-08:00

Unfortunately, my Canon was filled with salt water, the normal backup camera I keep in the car wasn't in the car, and all I had left was the camera on my cellphone, which just didn't do the late afternoon light much justice. I stopped at Libbey Beach, Ebey's Landing, Camp Casey, and Keystone Spit to watch the waves rolling southward down Admiralty Inlet (I've included a couple of cell phone pictures at the bottom of this post).

Bush Point was my last stop before the light ran out and I had to head for the Clinton ferry. The wind was howling from the north and locals were pulling up and letting their children and their dogs out to stand in the spray. Waves were crashing into the old restaurant/inn, launching themselves up through the decking of the wharf, and blowing over the two-story structure in big sheets.

Bush Point - one month ago

The tide was scheduled to peak a bit higher than 10' MLLW around 4PM (when I arrived), but the surge added more than a foot (here's the Seattle record), so the the water was right around MHHW. Imagine if this storm had arrived on a 2' higher tide!

AERIAL VIEW

Ebey's Landing

Camp Casey

Hastie Lake

2011-11-11T21:39:00.001-08:00

The strong westerly winds were coming out of a big hole in the clouds over the Strait, so I actually had some late afternoon sun. Hastie Lake is a little farther south on West Beach and is the site of a small boat ramp and a row of homes built on an old barrier beach. This would have been amazing to watch on a really high tide!

Tonight I'll try posting some of the videos I took this afternoon, including the one from here - my camera's last valiant effort before swallowing salt water and dying in a frenzy of small electronic gasps.

AERIAL VIEW

West Beach

2011-11-11T21:08:00.001-08:00

It's nice when storms come on weekends and state holidays - that way I don't sit in the office wishing I were on the beach. I just go. I headed for Whidbey via the northern route, figuring I could follow the afternoon's high tide and the shifting winds down the island. Deception Pass was quiet, as was Ala Spit on the northeast side of the island, and I was tempted to question the wisdom of the forecasts, but I arrived at West Beach to find the wind coming out of the west - furiously.

Cliff Mass's discussion of today's windstorm

SMITH ISLAND WINDSPEED
(located just west of this beach, I was there just before the peak)

The tide wasn't terribly high. If the water had been 1-2 feet higher, which it could easily have been, this storm would have caused a lot more damage. As it was, the wave runup only occasionally reached the bluff toe and we weren't even close to having logs washed over the road.

Swantown, April 2006 (earlier post on Gravel Beach)

AERIAL VIEW

VIDEOS:

Ala Spit

2011-11-11T20:35:00.001-08:00

The last time I visited Ala Spit, in early October, the park was closed and there were three excavators on the beach removing the old concrete rubble and repositioning rocks and logs (below). Today, the crews were gone, and nature was busy editing their final project. The neck of the spit had been eroding for a long time - for a bunch of reasons - and the junk that had been dumped on the beach to protect it wasn't helping. It may have been making it worse (Ala Spit, 2007-2008).

The project involved pulling out all the hard parts that were keeping the spit from responding constructively to wave action and adding sand and gravel in the form of a new higher berm. The berm is a bit higher than the natural berm would have been and the waves are already cutting a scarp into it, but that's okay. And this winter, I suspect waves will cut through the new berm, creating a lower and slightly broader feature. That will also allow the logs to distribute themselves more evenly - right now they are packed into a narrow band on the steep upper beachface. Some of the eroded sediment will be added to the beachface; some will get washed over and down the backside. The salicornia (pickle weed) will object initially, but will soon remember that this is how it always used to happen before the spit was buried in big rock and concrete.

AERIAL VIEW

Here's what it looked like a month ago.

Yaletown

2011-10-30T18:31:00.000-07:00

We're back to False Creek, this time along the north side, where the last two decades have seen an incredible transformation to park space and dense residential development. The shoreline is severely hardened - most of this edge is old fill that extends out into the historic False Creek estuary - but the seawall also provides another link in Vancouver's wonderful waterfront trail system. Variations in the height and design of the wall provide access and outlooks and interest. There have also been numerous attempts to provide some habitat, including intertidal benches, gravel and softer substrate, and even some shoreline vegetation.

AERIAL VIEW

Ambleside

2011-10-30T18:11:00.000-07:00

I may have seen this beach from the Lion's Gate Bridge earlier, but the first time it really registered with me was 20 years ago when I heard Wolf Bauer talk about it. But this week was the first time I've actually walked it - or watched the sun set from it!

The exposure to waves from the west must drive any loose sediment on the West Vancouver shoreline eastward and historically it probably wound up incorporated into the protruding delta of the Capilano River, which emerges into Burrard Inlet just east of the bridge. Groins (groynes, in Canadian) now organize West Vancouver's sand and gravel into pocket beaches - including the large one at Ambleside Park. The beach curves out to meet a large groyne, on the end of which stands a Squamish figure welcoming visitors to Vancouver and the Squamish's historic land.

AERIAL VIEW

West Vancouver

2011-10-29T21:12:00.000-07:00

There is a public promenade along the shoreline all the way from Dundarave to Ambleside (2-3 kms), most of it heavily armored to protect it from storm waves. The high tide prevented me from getting much of a sense of the intertidal, but it appears that the orientation, and perhaps severely limited sediment availability, results in little opportunity for real beaches except where projecting structures act as groins.

The West Vancouver Shoreline Preservation Society has been experimenting with using strategically placed rock to act as reefs to enhance habitat and to help trap sediment in the intertidal. They have also been working to improve stream mouths and stormwater outfalls along this heavily urbanized shoreline. I'll have to come back at a low tide sometime and take a closer look.

AERIAL VIEW

Dundarave

2011-10-29T21:00:00.000-07:00

I was originally just going to do a single "West Vancouver" post, but I couldn't decide what to leave out, so I've split it into three.

It was a quick late afternoon bus trip across the Lion's Gate Bridge to West Vancouver. I got off at 25th Avenue in the Dundarave neighborhood and walked down to the beach. The beach here is limited to a beautiful little fillet on the west side of the pier (a groin/jetty, actually), swash aligned with the significant fetch from the west across the Strait of Georgia.

There was a small, lower beach against a stepped seawall in the lee of the pier, but it was mainly under the relatively high tide.

West Vancouver Shoreline Preservation Society

AERIAL
(I'm adding this because sometimes the location feature below links to a view that is zoomed much too far out)

Creekside

2011-10-29T20:39:00.000-07:00

The last time I visited this site was on a dreary August morning two summers ago. Today's October sunshine was a great improvement.

This is the Olympic Village site at the southeast corner of False Creek, Vancouver's urban ex-estuary. The mud flats, fringing salt marsh, and small streams have all given way to a heavily developed, and redeveloped, landscape with a steep, hardened edge. There is a longer discussion of this site in the earlier post:

False Creek: August 2010

Several of us got a great tour of the area on the eve of the Salish Sea Conference. The upland development is a world class green development with sophisticated water re-use, energy efficiencies, stormwater systems, and careful choices of buildings materials. The shoreline is a little less green than the buildings, but there are still many ecological enhancements, including the habitat island and the stream/wetland in the park that manages stormwater.

And of course, like so much of Vancouver's shoreline, the edge is a very public and a very accessible one.

Nellita Creek

2011-10-29T20:19:00.000-07:00

I last visited this site in January 2010, only a few months after the seawall and the fill were removed and the stream mouth estuary was re-excavated. Now the site has had enough time for the vegetation to really begin to take hold. The stream has deposited a significant volume of sediment in the upper portion of the lagoon and this area is now high enough for alder to establish. The lower portions of the estuary are giving rise to various salt marsh plants. The mouth of the estuary is probably still trying to figure out how to balance the stream and the daily ebbing and flooding of the tides. On the other hand, I guess the mouths of estuaries are always trying to sort this out.

The spit itself is a pretty uneven feature. The beachface is marked by two distinct humps, perhaps an artifact of the original shoreline shape or perhaps the coarse-grained fans of earlier stream mouths. The restored spit has a low point in the berm that has been overtopped. Eventually, I expect the spit will even out a little bit, but there's not a lot of beach sediment and not a lot of wave action to move it around, so this process will be slow.

Sequalitchew Delta

2011-10-17T20:25:00.000-07:00

Despite its significance in shaping the modern Puget Sound landscape, the Vashon glaciation was remarkably brief (geologically) with the ice advancing and retreating across the southern Lowland in a thousand years, perhaps much less. Saturday's field trip looked at a fascinating legacy of the rapid recession.

As the ice melted northwards towards Tacoma, it may have trapped meltwater in a large lake beneath the ice in what is now the Puyallup Valley. When the pressure got high enough, the water burst out through spillways on the western edge of the valley and poured across Lakewood and Steilacoom, eroding and redepositing enormous volumes of gravel in a complex pattern of broad channels and terraces. LIDAR images capture a remarkable fluvial landscape stretching across the Lakewood and Steilacoom area, one not fully appreciated when stuck in Fort Lewis traffic on I-5.

The outburst floods (Jokulhaups), of which there were many, reached Lake Russell (the glacial lake that occupied South Puget Sound at that time) at Dupont and later near the mouth of Chambers Creek, where they formed large, steep, coarse-grained deltas. The tops of the deltas are 160-200 feet above the modern shoreline, corresponding to the level of Lake Russell.

Much of 20th-Century Seattle and Tacoma were built from sand and gravel mined from the Chambers Creek delta, but that pit ran out of room to grow and has been replaced by a park and a golf course (Pioneer: October 2010). Since then, the region has built its foundations and its roads and its bridges with aggregate from this paleo-delta in Dupont (aerial image), which lies just north of Sequalitchew Creek.

Present three dozen geologists with a 160' cliff of gravel foreset beds and they all get pretty excited. The afternoon sun was warming the gravel face and we were entertained by a near constant rain of pebbles. It was probably a good thing we weren't allowed to actually inspect the face carefully - we might have lost someone under a large pile of clean gravel. On the other hand, it would have been interesting to look more closely for clues as to how quickly this delta originally formed.

It was great that the folks from CalPortland were willing to show us around. Credit for the day goes to Kathy and Darrell and Matthew, who've put together a great story and led a great trip.

Monument Park

2011-10-16T21:20:00.000-07:00

If the Puget Sound shoreline has a start and an end, this would be Mile 0, at least for those of us who think from left to right (and who consider PS to include entire U.S. portion of the Salish Sea). It is also Mile 0 of the 49th parallel, at least the part of it that forms the boundary between the U.S. and Canada. It's a straight shot from here east to the Lake of the Woods (Minnesota/Manitoba).

The big trees on the bluff (which are nicely displayed on the trail down to the beach) suggest this bluff isn't eroding terribly fast. The beach to the south had a fairly wide berm (consistent with the slow bluff erosion).

I've noted before that this beach is one where it is possible the net drift direction has changed due to the construction of the ferry terminal and causeway on Roberts Bank, which forms a pretty effective breakwater for storm waves coming down the Strait of Georgia, although it's not clear to me what effect that would have on a straight stretch of beach like this.

I visited this same beach from the north several years ago (49th Parallel: August 2007). In both cases, I didn't wander too far across the line.

Lily Point

2011-10-16T20:50:00.000-07:00

Lily Point itself is a low cuspate foreland (recurved spit?), but the bluffs that surround it are high and steep. The south bluff contains a large deep-seated landslide (Lily Point: August 2011), whereas the north bluff is a simpler, but even more spectacular cliff of either glacial outwash or older fluvial sediments (paleo-Fraser River??), although I suspect the story is more complicated than that.

This bluff dumps an awful lot of sand onto the beach - and the beach to the north widens quickly to form a small barrier. Two miles north, after another section of cliffs, this beach becomes the Maple Beach described in the previous post.

Maple Beach

2011-10-16T20:27:00.000-07:00

At low tide, one can practically walk across Boundary Bay on the sand flats, but at high tide the water comes right up to the seawall. The upper beach and the berm of this sand spit is long gone beneath the roadway, although in recent years, nourishment has been used to rebuild the beach and provide protection to the wall itself.

Maple Beach: August 2006

The beach derives much of its coarse sediment from the bluffs at Lily Point south of here. And this beach is just the base of a much larger system of historic and modern spits that extends north across the border to Centennial Beach and Beach Grove in Tsawwassen.

The "C" on the marker might stand for Canada, although I suspect it does not. The border is a bit of a groin and the seawalls are just as impressive north of the border as south.

Sculpture Park Beach

2011-10-16T14:43:00.000-07:00

This wraps up our tour of pocket beaches along the Myrtle Edwards shoreline. This is the best known and the best documented and I've posted shots of it before. I still love the way this beach attracts people, both physically and visually. It's a nice contrast to the seawall to the south and the riprap to the north. It's also an interesting contrast to the two nearby pocket beaches described in the previous posts.

January 2007
November 2008
January 2010

Denny Way CSO

2011-10-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

Still in Myrtle Edwards Park, this small pocket beach is associated with the new Denny Way Combined Sewer Outfall. A few years ago, an intertidal gravel berm was added, and this coarse-grained beach is the result. I know almost nothing about the history of this project and would be curious to know what else has been done in the intervening period (Same site: June 2008).

Blogger's new LOCATION option below is nice, but it doesn't seem to allow me to control the default zoom. It still gets you to the correct place, but not at the initial scale I want. Here's this beach framed so as to avoid confusion with the two other small pocket beaches on both sides: Denny CSO.

Myrtle Edwards Park

2011-10-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

The beach and high bluff that marked the original shoreline is hundreds of yards inland at the foot of Queen Anne Hill. Elliott Avenue, the railroad, and Myrtle Edwards Park are all fill (most derived from the leveling of lower Queen Anne and the regrade, I believe), which means the park's waterward edge drops pretty steeply to subtidal depths.

Most of the shoreline is riprap, which may be effective at preventing the fill from eroding back into the Sound, but which is ugly and makes getting to the water unappealing and difficult. Shorelines are special places. Industrial ones require industrial solutions, but public ones require imaginative and welcoming ones. If rock is necessary, maybe an investment in better rock would be a start. Vancouver has used large granitic boulders on its English Bay shoreline, which encourage sitting and even allow safer access to the water itself. Sure it's more expensive, but it's also a nice place to linger, not just roller blade past.

But best of all is when the the configuration of the shoreline allows beaches. This one is somewhat incidental, I believe, but could probably be expanded. It flies in the face of anyone who would argue that the energy or the steepness of the shoreline preclude a sandier beach.

There is another pocket beach just down the shoreline at the Denny Street outfall - they added gravel to a small pocket a few years ago and it's shaped up nicely. And a little beyond that is the Sculpture Park beach. I'll add pictures of those in subsequent posts. There is talk of incorporating beaches into the reshaped central waterfront, too. I suspect as we move farther south, the beaches will continue to become progressively more engineered and less natural, although this may have more to do with design firms and big budgets than any natural limitations of the sites. I'll put in a strong plug for imagination and for learning from natural examples.

Useless Bay

2011-10-12T18:57:00.000-07:00

Useless Bay got its name from George Vancouver, who found its sandy shoals useless for larger boats. The shallow bay represents one of the larger sand traps in Puget Sound. Converging spits have formed at the north end of the bay, partially enclosing Deer Lagoon (now largely diked). (Aerial view) Homes line the primary spits on each side - homes where families can enjoy wide warm sand flats in the summer and ponder the significance of future sea level rise during the winter. (Useless Bay: February 2006 storm)

The first picture is from Double Bluff park on the west side, where a fascinating network of sand spits have grown and shifted during the course of the last couple of decades. There is no shortage of sand - both in the bay and coming from the big bluffs just around the corner.

The second picture is from Sunlight Beach on the east side of the bay and shows the remnants of Henny's Spit, which disassembled itself in the mid-1990s and continues to try to sort itself out. Part of its problem is that as new spits form, they starve existing spits down drift, leading to erosion, breaches, and instability. There is also a complex interplay in these sandy systems between offshore bars and subaerial spits. Maxwelton, three miles south of here along this same shoreline, also suffers from an overactive beach (Mackie Park).

Bush Point

2011-10-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

Bush Point is a cuspate foreland, a low triangular point protruding west into Admiralty Inlet on the west side of Whidbey Island (see LOCATION below). It formed where wave action from both north and south conspired to accumulate sediment. Waves are more prevalent from the south, but can also be significant from the north. Perhaps just as importantly, the landform itself shelters the coast north of the point from the southerlies, giving the northerlies an additional advantage. As the point grew, it secured its own future, drawing sediment to itself from both directions.

The shoreline north of Bush Point consists of high bluffs and several very large landslides, some more recently active than others. A small chunk slid last spring, taking out part of Susana Drive, but it was small compared to the much larger dormant slide that extends to the north. Looking north from Bush Point, it looks like there was plenty of movement last winter and if this fall is wet, the story may not be over.

I suppose whatever comes down the hill will end up on the Bush Point boat ramp a year or two from now.

Mariner's Cove

2011-10-12T18:34:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, this bowl on the shoreline east of Oak Harbor was probably a lagoon, surrounded by salt marsh, and cut off from the rest of the Sound by a narrow spit. Northerly drift would have forced the tidal inlet to the northern end, where remnants of what may have been its ebb-tide delta are still visible as scattered gravel bars in the nearshore.

This site, like so many, is best appreciated in an aerial view, which you can to through the LOCATION tag at the bottom of this post.

At some point, presumably when the developers dredged out the canals and created the building lots, the inlet was relocated to the southern (updrift) end of the spit and jetties were built to maintain the channel. Sediment builds up against the south side, but the beach to the north gets nothing. The result is a starved beach consisting of a lag of coarse gravel and cobble. Anything finer is trapped beneath this pavement of larger stone. The beach is almost flat, since there is no mobile gravel or sand for the waves to build into a normal beach face.

There's been talk for years about placing sediment dredged from the shoaling inlet onto this beach and I believe the community is close to making it happen. It will be interesting to watch. There are a few other bypass operations - all small by national standards - on Puget Sound. Point Roberts, Keystone Harbor, and maybe one or two small private marinas like this one.

West Edmonton

2011-09-22T20:07:00.000-07:00

This is a blog about beaches and I have sometimes gone out of my way to find beaches where others might not expect to find them. There's not much to say about this one, other than it's a pretty popular place. It doesn't have some of the dynamic aspects that attract me to most beaches - but I guess there's no troublesome erosion, either. Unlike most freshwater beaches in this part of Alberta, it doesn't freeze in the winter. The waves come and go, generated by some sort of mysterious force behind the proverbial curtain. It's surrounded by the 800 or so stores of the West Edmonton Mall.

The previous days have seen few beaches, other than the one at Clear Lake that I previously posted about, but we've seen many rivers, all of which are captured (if only briefly) in my other blog. The Missouri River (Chamberlain, SD), the Cannon River (Northfield, MN), and the Mississippi River (St. Paul, MN) all drain into the Gulf of Mexico. The Red and the Assiniboine (Winnipeg), the South Saskatchewan (Saskatoon), and the North Saskatchewan (Edmonton) all flow into Hudson Bay, via the Nelson River.

Blogger/Google has changed some things, which explains my occasional playing with different thumbnail sizes and layouts. It also means that the link to the map/aerial that I've traditionally provided by clicking on the title of the post, is now done by clicking on the location at the bottom of the post.

Clear Lake

2011-09-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

High in the mountains of Manitoba...well, everything is relative, particularly the mountains of Manitoba. Much of Manitoba is as flat as a cornfield - and some parts, like the huge leftover lakes Manitoba and Winnipeg, are even flatter. But Riding Mountain National Park rises above the prairie and supports a rolling landscape of birch and spruce forest.

Wasagaming, on the southern shore of Clear Lake, is the only major development in the park, and by development, we mean vintage tourist cabin resorts and a public beach. The beach here must be packed in the summer, but it seemed a bit out of place and I suspect it isn't original, or at least it isn't what this shoreline looked like two hundred years ago. After all, where would all this nice raked sand have come from?

The best beaches on Riding Mountain are much more subtle and I couldn't capture them in pictures. Lake Aggasiz, back in glacial times, lapped against the northern and eastern edge of the hills leaving a series of beach ridges that are now covered in aspens. Which I guess means that this post continues the theme of the last post, which also deals with the shorelines of long ago lakes.

Lake Missoula

2011-09-21T21:14:00.001-07:00

15,000 years ago, Missoula was underwater. Something like 40 times. And each time the ice dam would break and the water would race across Idaho and Washington and out the Columbia Gorge to the Pacific. But between dam breaks, the lake carved shorelines into the hills above the University.

Saturday morning (September 2nd) I hiked up to the "M" on Mount Sentinel, which provided great views of the strand lines across the way on Mount Jumbo. They show up well in the low light - but are pretty subtle when you're actually climbing across them.

Lake Bonneville (July 2007)

Lily Point

2011-08-07T22:46:00.000-07:00

Lily Point would have made a spectacular resort or development, but it makes a better park. Lots of hard work over many years led to its acquisition and recent dedication as a park and a marine reserve. This is the forested southeast corner of Point Roberts, a few steps removed from the residential development of Maple Beach to the north and of South Beach and the Marina to the west. For most Americans, visiting it requires a passport, since you must cross the border (twice) to get here.

From the tip of the point, you can look south to Lummi Island and Mount Constitution, northeast to the high rises of New Westminster and Burnaby in the Fraser Valley, and southwest to the Gulf Islands. On a clear day, Mount Baker rises to the east.

Lily Point itself is a cuspate foreland, bracketed by high bluffs. The bluffs to the north are bare and steep. The bluffs to the west consist include a large, deep-seated landslide, and is well-forested except in its steepest sections. It has all the classic symptoms --soft clay exposed on the beach itself, a steep shore bluff and a steeper head scarp, separated by a forested bench. I don't know how often it moves, but in the late 1990s, local residents in the area reported noise and dust when a big section let go.

Waves from the south erode the southwest bluff, carrying sediment both west to South Beach (where the sediment is periodically bypassed around the marina entrance) and north around the point towards Maple Beach. Maple Beach in the U.S. and Centennial Beach and Beach Grove on the B.C. side are part of a large complex of spits formed over the millennia by the erosion of Lily Point and then incorporated into the fringe of the Fraser delta.

Lily Point is by no means pristine and over 100 years ago it was the site of a major salmon cannery - remnants of which mark the beach on the north side of the low point. Native Americans/First Nations peoples apparently fished the point historically, but neither they nor the salmon were much of a match for industrial fishing.

Jack Block Park

2011-07-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

Three years ago I posted a photo of this beach but noted that it was fenced off (Jack Block Park: May 2008) Now it's open, providing access to the water from one of Seattle's best and most overlooked overlooks.

Port of Seattle News Release

This is one of a couple of gravel pocket beaches built into the shoreline of this Superfund site on the southwest shore of Elliott Bay. Waves will gradually reshape them, but the northern exposure makes significant wave action infrequent and this molding will take time.

The largest waves, when they do reach this beach, will come from the north and will strike this beach at a fairly oblique angle. I suspect this will lead to the gravel shifting southwestward over time. Imagine a pebble on of this beach. There will be plenty of waves from the north nudging it southwest. But it's hard to conjure a wave from the southwest to move it back. There's a reason pocket beaches are swash-aligned. It represents a stable configuration. This one is like filling a tilted glass with water and expecting it not to spill.

I'm intrigued by the opportunity to build beaches along these industrial shorelines on the leading edge of old river deltas. In this way, this site is similar to the Olympic View site on Commencement Bay in Tacoma that I mentioned in March (Olympic View, Tacoma: March 2011).

Golden Gardens

2011-07-06T18:13:00.000-07:00

It's amazing that in over 430 entries and more than 5 years, I have never posted anything from Golden Gardens, even though it's the closest beach to my home and does not lack for interesting stories.

Early on the morning of July 4th, the beach was still quiet. A few vans were unpacking for the day's activities and people were beginning to mark territory for the afternoon's celebrations, but not much more was going on.

The north beach is gravel and sand and has retreated over the decades, perhaps aided by railroad, which was built along the eroding bluffs to the north and eliminated a potential source of sediment. In the mid-1990s, the City chose to nourish the north beach and restore the wetlands behind the berm. Both have done well in the 15 years since.

Meadow Point (the name of the landform, Golden Gardens is the name of the park) is the site of one of the largest relatively intact (although by no means original or pristine) backshore dune areas found in central Puget Sound. Keeping the Scot's Broom and other obnoxious vegetation in check is a full-time job for the city and the park's volunteers.

North storms appear to dominate sediment movement at this site, since this shoreline is sheltered from the more common southerly waves by West Point. The large Shilshole Marina and it's breakwater to the south may also influence Meadow Point - they certainly represent an abrupt end to the beach south of the Park.

The southern beach is swash-aligned, forming a broad crescent that faces the southwesterly waves. It is broad and sandy and by later today will be filled with people throwing frisbees, playing volleyball, picnicking, and launching kayaks. The north beach tends to be more for beach walkers and kite flyers.

Unlike Seattle's other beachfront parks where fires are prohibited, here they are not. Which probably explains the remarkable lack of drift logs on the berm.

Dixie Lee wanted to put the aquarium at Golden Gardens. Wolf Bauer did not. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they argued about it, but in the end, the aquarium ended up on the downtown waterfront. This is neither the first nor the last beach that Wolf saved. Fittingly, Wolf was a key part of the design team that developed the 1996 beach restoration work.

Friday Harbor

2011-06-21T21:11:00.000-07:00

The University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratory has been perched here on the point north of the town for most of the last century. The research focus was historically more on marine biology and rocky coastlines than on beaches, which makes sense given its location.

The lab, like other water-oriented developments, has grown somewhat organically along the edge of the water - with the interest clearly more in getting to the water or using the water (the labs thrive on a lifeblood of circulating salt water) than in the shoreline itself. I found the waterfront a little ragged with its crumbling stone walls, its collapsing piles of riprap, and its abundance of pipes.

It might be interesting to look at historical photos of the lab's shoreline. I wouldn't expect too much natural change, although I saw some evidence that the beaches (limited as they are) may be continuing to erode. They would have done so anyways, plus any material that would have originally eroded from the banks to resupply them is safely secured behind all the riprap!

But it's sure a neat place to have a meeting! It's not exactly convenient, but it's a far more pleasant venue that an interior conference room in an office building in Olympia.

Eagle Cove

2011-06-21T20:56:00.000-07:00

If you take a rocky coastline and add a little sand and gravel, you'll get pocket beaches and there are no shortage of them here on the south end of San Juan Island. I knew this one existed, but didn't know you could actually get to it without owning it, until I found the little public access and parking area amidst the Sunset Magazine centerfolds.

The beach is only a few hundred feet long, it's sand and gravel isolated from every other beach in the world by rocky headlands and deep water. The gravel stays high, piled in steep berms and buried under drift logs. The sand forms a rippled terrace in the lower intertidal.

South Beach

2011-06-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

The south end of San Juan Island is why you can't categorize Puget Sound beaches in any simple way. It's the same ocean, and the same physics, both here and on the forested shores of Eld Inlet, but the beaches are cut from completely different cloth.

South Beach is a broad gravel berm that appears to have built seaward over time from the original base of the slope. It is covered with logs - apparently this is the last obstacle for logs trying to escape Puget Sound and many get no further than this. There are sand dunes - well-vegetated ones for the most part - climbing the slope to the north. The most obvious source of the beach gravel is the high eroding bluffs east toward Cattle Point, although I wonder if this beach also tells a story about the gradual erosion of Salmon Bank, which extends far offshore.

American Camp, of which this all part, is overrun with non-indigenous foxes. Cute little beggars - certainly cuter than those chickens all over the beaches on Kauai!

Jakle's Lagoon

2011-06-21T20:11:00.000-07:00

The north and south sides of the peninsula that ends in Cattle Point couldn't be much different. The south side is high grassy bluffs looking over the broad gravel strand of South Beach and twenty miles of water at the Olympic Mountains. The north side is forested and slopes down to Griffin Bay, where it is broken into a wonderful series of barrier lagoons. At the west end, down towards Fourth of July Beach, is Old Town Lagoon. At the east end, down towards Cape San Juan and it's exclusive nest of high end real estate, is Third Lagoon. And in the middle is Jakle's Lagoon, with it's gravel barrier, its lagoon, and its forest.

There is some evidence of an occasional tidal opening near the west end, but certainly not a persistent or regular connection. The wide gravel barrier gives rise to a broad marsh and eventually to a lagoon, its edges lined thickly with old drift logs. The pickle weed (Salicornia virginica) was doing its best to survive a colorful infestation of dodder (Cuscuta salina), a plant parasite that apparently takes many forms the world over.

I walked the cobbly beach to Third Lagoon, and then worked my way back via the mossy trail that follows the top edge of the bluff. On one shady section of beach, the upper intertidal gravel was covered with small snails (Littorina littorea, I assume). I've never seen them gathered so densely and have no explanation.

I've exceeded by usual quota of Latin, normally enforced by my ignorance of biology. Fortunately, the evening that followed this great day of beaches included dinner with people who actually understand this stuff.

Cattle Point

2011-06-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

Cattle Point is a rocky headland at the south east end of San Juan Island, jutting out into the eastern end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The lighthouse is perched on dunes, which are in turn perched on top of glacial sediments, which in turn mantle the underlying bedrock. There are a couple of wonderful pocket beaches just north around the corner and South Beach stretches out to the west.

Ship Harbor

2011-06-21T19:29:00.000-07:00

Ship Harbor is a north-facing cove just east of the Anacortes Ferry Terminal. It's a swash-aligned barrier beach and marsh with a long and complicated human history. It's basically a pocket beach trapped between Shannon Point and the ferry terminal to the west and the old railroad grade on the east. There may be some sediment trickling in from adjacent shorelines, but certainly no way for it to get out, except by gradual attrition or perhaps some loss offshore.

The shape of the beach is altered a bit by the remains of the old cannery -- metal slag (old tin can cuttings?), concrete foundation piers, and a forest of piles - each with it's own gull. The sand and gravel segregate themselves, both across the profile and along the beach. There was a sandy berm encroaching on the vegetation at the east end, suggesting some accretion there recently.

I'm not sure how the wetland drains - through the berm or through a pipe somewhere out of sight? There is a small "stream" bubbling from a concrete vault on the east end, carrying storm water from the new subdivision on the hill. It forms a small low tide delta -which is probably the sink for any extra sediment that makes its way to this end of the bay.

Ship Harbor, February 2009

Seattle

2011-05-21T08:37:00.000-07:00

The eastern shore of Elliott Bay was once a gravel beach with a steep bluff gradually rising from south to north, perhaps 80-100' high in the vicinity of Bell Street. But one thing leads to another and now the bluff is hidden in the jungle of buildings and roadways between Alaskan Way and Western Avenue. The waterfront was built on piers and wharves, then railroads were built parallel to shore (but over the beach), and then eventually, everything was filled in and the current seawall was built.

Now the seawall is being redesigned, the viaduct is slated for removal, and the city has embarked on a grand and long overdue scheme to redevelop its waterfront into a world-class urban shoreline. Thursday night, James Corner provided additional glimpses into the emerging ideas for this stretch of forested bluff and log-strewn beach at the mouth of the Duwamish River.

WaterfrontSeattle

Cape George

2011-05-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

Cape George is a large residential development west of Port Townsend. It faces northwest across the mouth of Discovery Bay, looking out over Protection Island and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Were it not for Protection Island, I suspect the shoreline would look very different, as the island is appropriately named (by George Vancouver back in 1792).

The community's primary link to the beach is a marina and community center built on an old spit and salt marsh - littoral drift is from north to south and sediment that bypasses the jetty is periodically dredged from the channel and placed on the beach immediately south.

The high bluff around the corner to the north has been active this winter, encouraged by the wet weather and stratigraphy that lends itself to hydrologically induced mid-bluff failures. There are massive clays or silts at the toe of the slope - in most cases, the slides have come down from above, although farther northeast, it looks like some historic slides may have cut deeper into this unit. There is a nice contrast between the heavily deformed fine-grained unit at the base and beautiful horizontally laminated sands higher in the bluff.

Port Hadlock

2011-05-21T07:27:00.000-07:00

Small, sheltered beaches often seem much more complicated than big, high energy ones. High energy ocean beaches with abundant sediment are just a simple (hah!) balance of wave energy and sediment mobility - the math is hard, but the geology is straightforward, almost absent. But these protected systems are a messy combination of an inherited landscape, a complex geologic framework, a spatially variable wave environment, the role of mixed grain size, often sediment-limited beaches, and the persistence of past human modifications.

Port Hadlock is located at the south end of Port Townsend Bay - where northerly waves dominate and Tertiary bedrock makes one of its rare Puget Sound appearances. Hadlock Spit extends southward from the boat building school, approaching but missing rocky Skunk Island down near the old alcohol plant (as usual, click on the title of the post for the aerial/map view). The beach beneath the boat yard appears to have built seaward, maybe as a lingering result of more than a century of piers and moored ships (and maybe an abundance of sand from the huge fill up at Irondale?). But this sandy beach narrows rapidly just north, with the tide lines swinging landward as if at the end of a spit (starved by the updrift accretion?). But the gravelly beach continues south. The boat ramp is built below the current beach grade, so sandy gravel constantly accumulates and is removed and put in a pile that then gradually erodes. But despite this miniature bypass operation, the shoreline another hundred yards south is eroding, undermining the road out to the private property on the spit itself.

I have few answers, only ideas and questions. Someday I would love to get together with the regular readers of the blog (all 3 of them?) at the Ajax Cafe to figure this all out (funny hats are optional)!

Craft Island

2011-05-09T20:05:00.000-07:00

As the Skagit Delta has expanded into Puget Sound, it has gradually engulfed the small islands that once must have dotted the northern portion of what was once a much larger Skagit Bay. Some of these islands are larger than others - Fidalgo Island, for example, which is only still an island by virtue of the Swinomish Channel. Most of these islands are simply hills now, rising out of the miles of low, flat tulip and mustard seed fields. Some are tiny rock dimples - by sheer luck rising slightly higher than modern sea level - juxtaposing ancient bedrock ledges against acres of tide flat and salt marsh.

If you drive to the west end of Rawlins Road (turn at the Snow Goose farm stand) and park, you can find a half-mile trail that skirts the high marsh out to this rocky knob. And if the tide is low, you can just keep on walking for miles.

Klootchman Rock

2011-05-09T19:57:00.000-07:00

This big hunk of metamorphic rock sits on the beach below Scenic Heights, somewhere between Penn Cove and Oak Harbor. I think it can safely be called an erratic - since it sure didn't start here and I can't imagine it having wandered here without the help of ice. It's so big, you can't help but wonder if there is a big divot missing somewhere on the side of a valley in British Columbia.

Longshore drift is from south to north along this beach and is interrupted by the rock and the tiny tombolo that attaches it to the base of the bluff. The beach is wider to the south and the bluff a little less severe. To the north, the apparent lack of sediment results in a much diminished beach and a steeper bluff. The aerial (click on the title of this post) shows a distinct offset in the bluff crest. Jerry Thorsen first pointed out the groin-like nature of this feature to me years ago - as an example of how local details can influence bluff recession patterns.

Blowers Bluff

2011-05-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

I need to explore this beach with a better geologist along - one who really understands the complex stratigraphy and sedimentary tales exposed on these spectacular high cliffs. The first, and last, time I walked this beach was with better geologists, but I'm afraid I took too few notes and remember too little.

The cliffs keep getting higher as you round the corner from Penn Cove and the number of layers keeps growing. There are wonderful layered bedded fluvial sediments, presumably from some earlier interglacial floodplain. There are coarse gravels and glacial tills and layers containing giant chunks of other layers - the latter must be a fascinating story. There are peat beds peaking through the cobbles on the mid beach. And there are many small and large boulders - the largest of which I'll save for the next post.

Monroe's Landing

2011-05-09T19:50:00.000-07:00

I suppose it is the interplay of easterly and westerly wave action that results in accretion here inside the northeastern corner of Penn Cove. This small barrier beach shelters a brackish wetland, filled with logs that have wandered up Saratoga Passage from the south and become permanently lodged. Like the logs that accumulate in so many of these marshes, most are cut - probably escapees from early log rafting. The cut timbers (telephone poles, basically) float easily and are readily washed over the berm during high tides. Once trapped inside, winds blow them to the north sides of these ponds, where the logs pack together tightly. And they decay very, very slowly. Wood, including some very big wood, is a fundamental component of Salish Sea beaches and marshes, but these dense mats of timber are not likely what would have been found here two centuries ago.

Penn Cove is known for it's mussels. Maybe they cultivate them here because it is such a natural nursery. Or maybe its the enthusiastic cultivation that explains the mussel-covered beaches spilling out of the entrance of Penn Cove. Like the logs, I wonder if the abundance is actually a human legacy.

Long before Captain Thomas Coupe, killer whale round-ups, (an infamous legacy of Penn Cove), and mussel rafts, Monroe's Landing was a gathering place for the Lower Skagit tribe.

Termination Point

2011-05-09T19:45:00.000-07:00

The big landslides at Termination Point used to feed the beaches northeastward towards Shine Tidelands and Bywater Bay, but the embankment that supports the west end of the Hood Canal floating bridge cuts across the base of the old spit. This starves the beach at Shine Tidelands, resulting in coarse cobble and an eroding berm. But because the bridge approach acts like a big groin, it traps sediment on the south side and results in a beautiful little swash-aligned pocket beach.

Howarth Park

2011-05-09T19:34:00.000-07:00

The railroad and the high bluffs make access to the beach between Seattle and Everett a tricky proposition, but there are places where stream valleys, pedestrian overpasses, and public parks conspire to make it possible - Carkeek Park, Picnic Point, and Howarth Park, for example.

The natural stream mouth at Howarth is obscured beneath the railroad grade and the big pile of dirt that surrounds the stair tower -- the creek tumbles out of a long culvert onto the riprap. From the look of the wetland next to the parking lot, this stream might have had a sufficiently low gradient to result in a nice little estuary (probably behind a small spit - sort of like the one down the beach at Merrill and Ring Creek).

Sekiu

2011-03-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

This unusual beach is located just north around the corner from Sekiu. The beach gives way to a rocky platform in both directions, but there's something here that allows the beach to persist. This may be part of one of the many big landslides that dot this coastline - something about this Tertiary sedimentary rock that can't stand up well on its own. But is this sand all derived from the local sandstone, or is it glacial or other Pleistocene debris?

Hoko River

2011-03-29T19:39:00.000-07:00

The Hoko emerges just west of rocky Kydaka Point into a coastal compartment that also includes the mouth of the Sekiu River a little farther up the coast to the west. It looks like the sediment probably all ends up down here, to be periodically reworked by the shifting river mouth.

There were some huge logs washed up on the beach. There were some fascinating overwash terraces (for lack of knowing the appropriate term) on the spit where it hooked into the river mouth. And there was a very impressive riprap fortress protecting the dozen or so houses built along Vista Lane.

Bullman Beach

2011-03-29T19:10:00.000-07:00

I hadn't been this far out the Strait for years, and then two trips in about a month. This particular morning I caught the 5:30 Edmonds ferry and made it to Bullman's by 9AM.

The shoreline out here is rocky, with beaches located only where some combination of shoreline configuration and local sediment sources conspire. Bullman's is a half a mile of pocket beach fed largely, as far as I can tell, by the stream that emerges in the middle. A rocky promontory at the eastern end keeps the waves coming in the Strait from spilling sand out that end. As with any pocket beach, it's orientation probably tells us as much about the angle of wave action on this beach as any sophisticated model would.

Kelp was washed up in berms at the west end, pushed against sandstone boulders that looked almost like highway department riprap (but for the most part, were not).

The backshore grades landward to meet the filled areas around the homes. This end of the Olympic Peninsula is being pushed up faster than sea level is rising (at least during the past century, but maybe not the next), so I'm guessing the shoreline is gradually marching seaward. But I wonder what the story with those huge stumps in the back beach near the west end - did they wash in (how?), or are they in growth position -- which might really complicate the story.

Olympic View

2011-03-10T21:07:00.001-08:00

By all rights, there should be no beach here at all. This was once mud flats on the delta of the Puyallup River, but progress filled the marshes and the flats, bringing dry land as close to deep water as earth-moving economics would allow. This shoreline was marked by wharves and industry - and much of it still is. But the shoreline faces into the major fetch, raising the possibility of stable beaches, and as old piles and rubble have been removed, and as sand and gravel has been brought in to cap contaminated sediment, beaches are appearing.

This site is complicated - most sites are. A small pocket lagoon has been created in order to restore marsh and intertidal habitat, something rare in Commencement Bay. But the tide must come and go through an opening that the newly formed beach wants to bridge with a berm. Storms drive the gravel up the profile, building the small spit higher and pushing it into the mouth of the inlet, where it might potentially raise the sill elevation of the lagoon. One could engineer a "stable" configuration, but maybe it's better to let the tides and the waves sort this out themselves.

Irondale

2011-03-06T20:31:00.000-08:00

Once, the forested bluff rose directly from a narrow beach. High tides probably reached in among fallen trees and drift wood making walking on the beach difficult and canoes were probably the preferred mode of travel along the western edge of Port Townsend Bay.

In the 1880s a steel mill was built here, processing thousands of tons of iron a year. Wharves, foundries and fabrication buildings, charcoal kilns, and slag from the blast furnace spread across the site. The community of Irondale grew around the mill. But by 1900, the town's steel working origins were already history.

In the early 1900s, the whole shoreline from here north to the mouth of Chimacum Creek was buried under sand and clam shell dredged from the bay. The broad, flat, artificial landscape was a log storage yard well into the 1990s, when public groups stepped in to reclaim the site.

The legacy of the old mill remains. The forest grows from the moss-covered foundations of the buildings on the hill. Large concrete relics are scattered on the beach and the slag forms a small headland, resisting the southward transport of sand from the eroding shoreline to the north. Farther south, circular brick beehive kilns are eroding from the bank. The beach is littered with brick, slag, and all the other hard parts that were left behind as the sea transgressed back across the site.

It is now all part of Jefferson County's Irondale Beach Park. The northern segment was largely restored several years ago (I've written several times about Chimacum Beach) and now efforts are underway to clean up the less appealing leftovers of the old steel mill and restore the beach. The slag will probably go, along with lots of contaminated soil, and the shoreline will have to be reconfigured, but it will come back as a beach - probably not the narrow one at the toe of the bluff that existed 150 years ago, but a sandy one that encourages exploration. Historical aspects of the site will still be the central theme, a neat reminder that every beach has a story. Sometimes many.

Tsoo-Yess Beach

2011-02-22T16:31:00.000-08:00

Just south of the rocky cliffs of Cape Flattery are two wonderful sandy barrier beaches. Hobuck and Tsoo-Yess (Sooes) Beaches are both spits - the Hobuck at the mouth of the Waatch River and Tsoo-Yess at the mouth of the Sooes River (not surprisingly the maps I've seen alternate between native and anglicized place names).

The beaches are basically crescent shaped pocket beaches, contained within Makah bay, but both are further modified by additional rocky headlands and outcrops (Aerial, courtesy of Google), as well as the stream mouths.

On the 26th of January, 1700, when the Cascadia Subduction Zone last slipped, the resulting tsunami may have overtopped these low, flat beaches. Makah tribal accounts recall the devastating impacts of the wave in the Waatch River Valley (USGS link).

Cape Flattery

2011-02-22T16:19:00.000-08:00

The northwestern tip of the continental United States is this rocky headland, looking out at the Tatoosh Island Lighthouse and across the entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca (and therefore to Puget Sound, the Georgia Basin, and the entire Salish Sea). That's Vancouver Island in the distance.

It's a long drive from Seattle, but not out of reach for a one day trip, which is how D and I ended up here last Saturday afternoon. The trail out to the overlook is easy and the weather was wonderful - although I suspect we were very lucky. There was a strong, cold north wind during the crossing from Edmonds in the morning, but the drive out along the Strait was calm and pleasant.

Hammersley Inlet

2011-01-25T21:11:00.000-08:00

Hammersley Inlet seems more like a big river than it does a remote arm of the Pacific Ocean. It is narrow and runs east-west, which together conspire against big waves. Most of the energy along here comes from passing tugs and tidal currents and there's not much sediment moving around on the beaches. Marsh grasses and Salicornia are able to establish themselves on the upper beach in some substrates (probably whatever is beneath the thin beach veneer, not the beach material itself).

Occasionally in South Puget Sound I run into one of these zigzag concrete Lincoln Log bulkheads. From old air photos, I suspect they date to the 1960s or early 1970s. They probably wouldn't last in a higher energy area where big logs could get tossed against the structure during storms.

This shoreline has a long history. Until a few decades ago, a road followed the top of the bank. And long before that, it looks like there must have been a corduroy road along the back of the beach itself. There are places here where you can still see the horizontal logs in the beach in front of newer bulkheads!

Allyn

2011-01-25T20:56:00.000-08:00

Three months without a post! I need a bumper sticker that says "a bad day at the beach is still better than a good day of meetings". There have been far too many days of meetings although some have been good ones. And there have been far too few brief trips to the beach. In December, I checked out the recent renourishment at Lincoln Park. And one weekend I wandered out to Golden Gardens, the nearest beach to my house, simply since I hadn't been there in a long time. But somehow the pictures haven't made it to the blog.

Monday (now over two weeks ago) was a nice break in the office-bound routine. The roads of Mason County were empty and snowy and made for a pleasant trip to the site visit near Shelton.

I mentioned Allyn in a post earlier this fall from Manchester. They are both towns where boat ramps have been built to span the upper beach to minimize impacts on beach habitat and sediment transport. Because they are basically bridges, they require different engineering than conventional ramps. I'm not sure what happened here, but it is coming apart and has been closed for some time.

Jetty Island

2010-10-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon I took the kayak up to Everett and paddled across to Jetty Island. In the summer, the City runs a ferry over to the island and the main beach on the west side fills up with people enjoying the warm (relatively) water flooding in over the broad sand flats, but on this trip I had the whole place to myself.

The tide was high, so there wasn't much beach to walk on (and the upland portion of the island, at least the north end, is North America's densest thicket of Himalayan blackberry). I walked up to the northeastern tip of the island,
which was littered with remnants of old structures and lots of big wood, washed down the river and stranded on the beach. Then I wandered back to the main beach, the spit, and the lagoon.

Everett is located just south of the mouth of the Snohomish River (as was the historic Tulalip community of Hibulb, long before Everett Colby's father founded the city). The shallow subtidal foredelta of the river extends out into Port Gardner, making deep water access difficult, so a century ago, a jetty (training structure or breakwater?) was constructed to channel the main stem of the river southward along the waterfront (see the aerial photo linked to the title of this post). Dredged sand was placed on the western side of this structure and gradually a new island was built. In 1989, the Port of Everett used the dredged material to create an artificial berm - basically a spit, that in turn formed a large tidal lagoon.

Jetty Island is a Puget Sound anomaly. It is all sand, river sand, unlike most of our gravelly beaches, which get their sediment from eroding bluffs and small, steep streams. It is completely artificial - this entire area was shallow sand flats historically. And it is the largest beach nourishment project on the Sound and the only one built from dredged river sand. It is a frequently cited example (particularly by the Corps) of beneficial use (of dredged sediment).

Some folks note that the ecological picture painted at Jetty Island isn't really true restoration (they're right). Others seem more put off by the blackberries and invasive species than they are impressed by the salt marsh and the birds. And some people are just leery of pretty much everything the Corps of Engineers does (not an unwarranted skepticism). But ultimately, this is a pretty neat place. Maybe they ought to build something like this outboard of the Shilshole breakwater or along a section of the railroad grade!

Elwha Delta

2010-10-10T17:25:00.000-07:00

This is a little out of order - I managed to skip over it when posting other entries last week. These shots go back about two weeks.

The Elwha River drains the northern interior of the Olympic Mountains, arriving at the coast in a gravelly delta a few miles west of Port Angeles. The river mouth shifts around, although maybe not as much as it did before the levees were built in the lower valley - including one immediately west of the mouth that has recently been raised. The mouth is a complex set of coarse gravel spits, bars, and islands and a number of small lakes and lagoons.

The delta projects well out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca where it is influenced both by waves and swell from the west, as well as storm waves from the northeast. The beach on the western side, facing Freshwater Bay, is a broad crescent and longshore transport may be fairly balanced (aerial view). On the eastern side, however, the beach that fronts the delta is eroding rapidly and sediment is moved eastward down the coast towards Ediz Hook in Port Angeles (previous posts on this stretch of shoreline).

The Elwha's two high dams are supposed to start coming out next year. It may be some time before the gravel behind the dams shows up at the coast, but maybe the delta will see more immediate changes due to differences in flood events or the release of fine sediment. This is going to be a neat place to watch over the next decade.

Pioneer

2010-10-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

I titled this post "Pioneer" since that's what the sign along the railroad calls it - and since Pioneer was the major operator of the huge gravel pits that marked this site for the most of the 20th century. I could have called it Chambers Creek, since it lies just north of the creek and because the whole place is now managed as "Chambers Creek Properties", including its brand new premier golf course. But I'd rather reserve that title for the Creek itself - which I have (Chambers Creek-2008).

The 200' gravel-rich bluffs once reached to the Sound (historical photo), but they were excavated back a kilometer to help build Seattle and Tacoma and all the roads that connect them. Now there is a rolling reclaimed landscape - part treatment plant, part park, and of course, part golf course. The railroad still runs along the shoreline, but there is now a new overpass connecting the park to its two mile long beach. Or at least two miles when the tide isn't too high, since there are places it runs up against the railroad riprap at high tide.

Sequalitchew Creek

2010-10-07T20:26:00.000-07:00

Sequalitchew Creek is trapped in a narrow ravine between the former Dupont munitions plant (now Northwest Landing, a large planned development, and its golf course) and the big still-operating gravel pit to the north. The original Fort Nisqually (established in 1833 by the Hudson's Bay Company and the first European settlement in Washington) was located on this creek.

The creek empties into the Sound just north of the Nisqually Delta through a small estuary, or at least it did prior to the Northern Pacific building a railroad along this shoreline in the late 1800s. The creek now reaches the beach through a small box culvert below the mainline from Seattle to Portland. A small marsh remains trapped in the valley above the railroad embankment.

A narrow gauge rail line used to serve the munitions plant, running down the ravine, passing under the mainline, and out to a pier (long unused, but only recently removed). You can walk down the old grade to the marsh, through the short tunnel, and then emerge suddenly, and spectacularly, at the beach and the Sound.

Yukon Harbor

2010-10-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

The road was probably built on the back of the beach a century ago. Sea level is probably 20-25 cms higher since then, and the big house on the artificial point just north has trapped any sediment originally destined to rebuild this beach, so the road was getting undermined.

They could have dumped rock - such an easy, cheap, ugly, and often not completely successful solution. But instead, they tried anchoring logs on the beach face and reinforcing the soils on the bank with geofabric. I don't know the whole story here, but I wish we had the resources to monitor more of these (other than brief visits while racing to the late afternoon ferry). We could actually start to learn something. And then we could tweak the design, not just bury it under riprap next winter when the storms roll in.

I believe the logs are intended to act like sills and help perch a slightly higher beach behind them, reducing wave action at the bank. Sometimes this approach works, but often it does not, with beaches rising and falling as if they are oblivious to the logs' intended role. Here, I don't think the logs have hurt, I'm just not sure they've added much.

The geotextile is "softer" than riprap and allows for planting if it doesn't unravel, but it has neither the resistance to erosion (and floating logs) of something more durable, nor the ability to act like a natural gravel berm. I suppose a more substantial gravel berm might have been worked a little better here, although there might still have been need for some structural elements and some occasional maintenance - in the form of a truckload of sandy gravel every couple of years. But ultimately, there just isn't much room to work where the beach is narrowest. These sites are never easy.

Manchester

2010-10-07T19:23:00.000-07:00

Boat ramps are notorious for acting like groins and for paving over viable beach habitat. It's hard to bury one's eggs in concrete. So in several places on the Sound, new ramps have been built like this, bridging over the beach. Others can be found in Allyn, Silverdale, and a few other spots. Like any bridging structure or pier, they can trap drift logs and then they begin to act like groins - which means some maintenance is required. It also seems to matter how they are oriented. If wave action is oblique, it is more likely to transport sediment under and past the structure. But if wave action is more normal to the beach, sediment tends to accumulate beneath the structure, which shouldn't be a surprise, but sort of defeats the purpose of allowing unimpeded sediment transport.

I like this little park - it's got great views across the Sound at our local metropolis. The edge of the lawn is a little ragged, as it is built on fill and the waves want to nibble way at it, but generally it is doing fine. This is a nice little sandy beach - at least by the coarse standard of this region.

Clam Bay

2010-10-07T19:12:00.000-07:00

The beach on the northwest side of Clam Bay was once a spit with a lagoon tucked in behind. But the lagoon made a convenient dumping ground and became a cleanup site. It is ironic that it is also now the site of an EPA and Department of Ecology Laboratory and that there is a NOAA Fisheries lab at the head of the bay.

The site of the old lagoon was capped with clean fill, but instead of armoring the shoreline (which consisted of various nasty things corroding out of the gravel), they built a beach. The beach has adaptively managed itself a little since it was constructed, with some erosion occurring at the southeastern (updrift) end and a new berm forming farther bayward at the western end, but all in all its done quite nicely (or so it appears to this casual observer) and sure beats a foreshore covered with basalt boulders and quarry spalls.

Twanoh State Park

2010-10-07T18:12:00.000-07:00

Twanoh State Park is perched on the delta of Twanoh Creek, along the south shore of Hood Canal. The shoreline of this part of Hood Canal (not really a canal) is heavily built with homes, perhaps obscuring an interesting geologic history, since they may be built on a raised terrace resulting from late Holocene earthquakes. Various characteristics of this shoreline suggest that it was elevated at some point, or points, in the past.

The parking lot and boat ramp on the west side are built on top of the original beach (if there ever was much of one) and the stream delta. What isn't covered by pavement is covered with broken riprap, but fortunately today's tide kept that out of sight. There's a small beach, with wrack lines of oyster shell and leaves and eelgrass, just west of the ramp (and featured in one of the first posts in this blog, way back in late 2005 -- Hood Canal).

On the east side, there's a nice gravel beach swash-aligned with the maximum fetch from the east, and a long narrow lagoon that's been modified and plumbed for children (the old maps show with an inlet near the tip of the point). Discussions today were around what might be done to improve the ecology without jeopardizing either the recreational uses or the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps landscape and historic stone structures.

Twin Rivers

2010-10-07T18:00:00.000-07:00

We visited the site because questions have arisen about what do with the old mole (basically the term for an artificial peninsula used as a pier), which hasn't been used since the quarry shut down years ago. It was a fascinating feature, but so were the surrounding hill slopes, that were heading for the sea as fast as they could.

This stretch of shoreline along the Strait of Juan de Fuca is known for large slides and these were very impressive. The pictures show both the tilted and broken forest characteristic of active sliding and the raised beach where the toe of the landslide has pushed upward.

Marrowstone Isthmus

2010-10-07T17:48:00.000-07:00

Marrowstone and Indian Islands are connected at their southern end by a road and a tombolo and a salt marsh. The old maps raise the possibility that there might have once been a tidal connection of some sort (and that the tombolo was a spit) and that it vanished when the road culvert cut off too much of the exchange. It's a complex site, since Kilisut Harbor (between the two islands) also has a substantial inlet at the other end. Reconnecting might be good for commuting fish and circulation in the lower bay, but it would require opening up the culverts into a bridge of some sort and reestablishing a channel through a portion of the marsh and barrier beach. Nothing is going to happen right away, but it's interesting to think about.

Sediment on this beach is transported northwestward by wave action, eventually forming the wonderful spits and lagoons at the southwest end of Indian Island.

Sound View

2010-09-28T20:03:00.000-07:00

I postponed writing this post thinking I could find the photos from my first visit, almost 20 years ago, to this little cemetery perched on the edge of Puget Sound. Sound View Cemetery makes a nice reference for tracking bluff erosion. The fence is pretty much right on the line, at least at the north end, and somewhere I have notes showing how far away it was before.

Jasper Beach

2010-08-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

I'd only seen aerial photos of Jasper Beach before this visit, so I admit I was completely unprepared when I came to the end of the dirt road and found it blocked by a wall of gravel that extended a mile along the shoreline.

Most gravel beaches aren't really gravel beaches. They are mixed sand and gravel, sand with a surface veneer of gravel, cobble, coarse sand, and so forth. But Jasper Beach is a really a gravel beach. It looked like a training site for Maine DOT crews.

The beach face was broken into a series of berms - I'd like to call them swash terraces - and the seaward slope was incredibly steep, as might be expected on a beach with such uniform large gravel. Even with today's very gentle swell, the beach was noisy with rolling gravel.

The main lagoon (lake) is behind the eastern end of the barrier, but the berm also cut off a small valley just west of the parking area, forming a stagnant pond. The berm had been breached here in the past (recent past?), based on a big divot in the gravel ridge and small gravel overwash fan.

Roques Bluff

2010-08-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

The main beach at Roques Bluff State Park is a sand and gravel barrier separating Simpson Pond from the Atlantic.

There was a beautiful set of gravel cusps (gravel horns, sandy troughs) at the west end. You could also see the coarse gravel storm berm peaking out at the back of the beach from under the sand and the backshore vegetation. I suspect this beach changes significantly in appearance from summer to winter.

There is an interesting variety of beaches and bluffs to the east of the State Park, including a fast flowing tidal inlet and an impressive bluff completely armored in rock. I suppose there's a neat glacial deposit hidden underneath!

Cutler

2010-08-30T11:00:00.000-07:00

This stretch of rocky coast north of Cutler is billed as Maine's Bold Coast. There are some big blocks of public land, providing access and preserving it from the development that would inevitably encroach on this wilderness shoreline. There were other cars in the small lot, but I saw no one else on my one mile hike out to the sea and back.

A couple of days later and the swell from Hurricane Earl might have made this even more impressive!

East Quoddy Head

2010-08-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

East Quoddy Head is at the northern tip of Campobello Island. The narrow peninsula breaks into a series of islands separated from one another at high tide. The light station is on the furthest north of these.

A simple gravel tombolo connects the first of these smaller islands with the rest of Campobello.

The humpbacks were fishing in the bay, occasionally surfacing and blowing. It was easy to hear them; harder to get pictures of them.

East Quoddy's American counterpart is West Quoddy Head, where I watched the sun rise this morning (hshipman: West Quoddy Head).

Herring Cove

2010-08-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

Campobello Island is in New Brunswick, across a short bridge and a narrow channel from Lubec, Maine. Herring Cove is on the south side of the island, just across the hill from the Roosevelt Cottage (so FDR probably new this beach well).

The tide range here at the entrance to the Bay of Fundy is high (25 feet or so) and the tide this morning was pretty low, so the beach was impressively wide! Behind the low dunes, there is a coastal lake that must, at least some of the time, drain out the east end of this beach, but today the channel was dry and only a little bit of water was seeping out of the lower beach face.

The fishermen were preparing their nets for seining, so I guess the name Herring Cove remains appropriate.

There are more pictures of Campobello, and of the rest of this long weekend in Maine, at my hshipman blog.

Schoodic Peninsula

2010-08-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

I suspect Schoodic Point is best known for waves crashing on its rocky headlands and that was the primary reason that I raced to get here before the sun set on my overstuffed day in Acadia.

The sunset was great, the rocky ledges impressive (but the waves today were pretty small). But what really impressed me were the boulder berms on the east side of the Point. Boulders and huge cobbles stacked along the shore, offering some sort of hint at what winter storms must be like along here. If only I had left more time to explore them! When I do come back, I'll also want to check out the gravel barriers around the pond on the west side.

Seawall Beach

2010-08-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

I guess there is something a little oxymoronic about the name of this place, but it is also an advertisement for the inherent stability of coarse gravel berms. The gravel and cobble are piled up into a variety of configurations along the back of these rocky platforms. These photos were all taken within half a mile of each other. And there isn't a seawall in sight.

Little Hunter's Beach

2010-08-29T13:30:00.000-07:00

Little Hunter's Beach is located at a small stream mouth in a equally small cove near Schooner Head on the south edge of Mount Desert Island. Its truly a gravel beach, in contrast to Sand beach or the boulders and cobbles at Monument Cove. I suspect this has more to do with the nature of the glacial source of this material than anything else.

Even in today's calm conditions, you could hear the gravel rattling up and down with the waves and watch the swash get sucked into the steep, permeable beachface.

As we've moved west along this coastline, the pink granite of the Otter Cliffs have given rise to a dark schist.

Monument Cove

2010-08-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

Monument Cove is a small pocket beach, hidden in a cove between Thunder Hole and Otter Cliffs. It would be easy to miss and it looks difficult to get down to (I didn't try). I've seen this beach in dozens of calendar pictures over the years and it's cool to see it for real.

The grain size is huge compared to Sand Beach, just a mile or so away, going to show that you can't predict beaches on gross characterizations of geology or wave energy. The details matter. Source and abundance of sediment, orientation, and simply the antecedent history of the particular beach.

Sand Beach

2010-08-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

Acadia National Park and Mount Desert Island, and this portion of the Down East coast in general, are better known for its rocky headlands than for its beaches, but there are beaches, and each is very different than the next.

Sand Beach, is just that. The sand is mainly shell fragments. It is a pocket beach - actually a barrier - with what appears to be an occasional outlet at its easternmost end. The beach is backed by dunes and a lagoon, then by forest and rocky hills. The back of the beach, at least at each end, lay against a coarse cobble berm. I suppose this may be much better exposed in February after a stormy winter than in August.

Rockland

2010-08-27T13:00:00.000-07:00

Rockland Harbor is sheltered by a beautiful stone breakwater that extends across the north side of the bay from an armored headland (the golf course for the Samoset Resort). There was a nice little pocket beach tucked in on the inside of the base of the breakwater. It consisted of sand, gravel, and periwinkle shells. The beach wrack consisted of washed up fucus and apples.

Pemaquid Point

2010-08-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Maine for a long weekend on the Down East coast.

There are beaches of one sort or another (all small) scattered around Pemaquid, but the point itself is a classic rocky headland. Like much of mid-coast Maine, the glaciers pretty much followed the metamorphic fabric so the strike of these tightly folded Paleozoic rocks parallels the point as it plunges southward into the Atlantic.

The waves today were modest, at best, and remain so throughout this trip. As I write this, one week later, Hurricane Earl is probably stirring up things a bit.

Southey Point

2010-08-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

The northeastern tip of Salt Spring Island, along Trincomali Channel, consists mainly of sandstone ledges and boulders derived from them, but there are also beaches where the bedrock allows and where sediment is available. The aerial image shows how the rocky points trap pocket beaches and barriers across the mouths of the small valleys.

On Tuesday, I paddled around from Southey Point. On Thursday, I came back by foot to explore a couple of these small beaches. They are composed of sandstone gravel and pebbles and a high proportion of broken shell. Some of the shell is washed up from the lower beach, but some of it is eroded out of the bank, which either due to waves or previous inhabitants, is thickly layered with clam shells. The sandstone makes beautiful skipping stones, the best of which are always concentrated high on the berm. It has something to do with their shape and preferential transport by the swash.

The largest beach shelters a high salt marsh and tiny estuary, with the small stream trickling out where the spit pushes it against the bank on the western edge. Occasional high tides have pushed a wedge of gravel into the estuary, forming a small flood-tide delta. The stream drains out across a broad intertidal delta-fan, with lots of evidence that the stream and the wave-built gravel bars shift around. This is a big pile of sediment in a place without an obvious source of new sediment, except for the clam shell. I suspect the stream and the waves have been pushing the stuff back and forth on the beach for millenia - the stream carries it down during low tides (alluvial fan), the waves carry it back up during storms (swash bars).

False Creek

2010-08-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

The shoreline of False Creek has been redeveloping in chunks over the past couple of decades - often with big short-term events driving the pattern. Expo 87 on the north side and more recently, the 2010 Olympic Village on the southeast shore. The latter is where I spent a very gray hour on Saturday morning exploring an estuarine edge trying to balance between public use and environmental improvements ... both far better than an inaccessible private or industrial waterfront, but a tough combination to mesh sometimes.

Based on some historical maps and photos I've seen, and a fuzzy geomorphic sense of what this type of setting should look like, I suspect this low energy rocky coast is probably not the muddier, marshier fringe that once existed, but by intentionally complicating the texture and shape of the shoreline it can't help but be a dramatic improvement over what was here just a few years ago.

The habitat island is connected to the mainland by a pseudotombolo - not a very likely geomorphic feature for a sheltered bay like this one - but a landform that gives rise to a diversity of environments, particularly when combined with the new stream (is this False Creek?) that channels urban runoff through the park. The shoreline is largely shaped by riprap and armor rock, but lots of finer material has been added to enhance the quality and variety of habitats.

Ohio Street Beach

2010-07-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

Ohio Street Beach is a small wedge of sand trapped between Chicago's big water treatment plant and the city itself.

North Avenue Beach

2010-07-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

North Avenue Beach is a broad crescent of sand held in place by a long curving concrete jetty (groin?). The beach was quiet in the morning, but by afternoon it was packed with volleyball players and sunbathers.

There's a great map of Chicago's lakefront parks at: Lakefront Map

Oak Street Beach

2010-07-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, sand worked its way southward down the west side of Lake Michigan, building out into the lake in a series of spits at the mouth of the Chicago River. But one thing led to another and the beaches were gradually (or not so gradually) left behind as the city moved into the lake.

Then David Burnham came along and saw the potential for a hugely public, albeit hugely artificial, shoreline. Like many other Great Lakes cities, lake fill was an obvious solution, but in Chicago they seemed to have done it better and bigger than others. The result is miles of public park along the lake front, trimmed with stepped concrete walls, artificial beaches, marinas, and park space. The wind and wave regime hasn't changed appreciably since the city arrived, so sand placed along the shore would move southward rapidly were it not configured with jetties and landfill into a series of north facing pocket beaches. Some are isolated, some segmented by groins.

Oak Street Beach, at the north end of Michigan Avenue, fits into a corner in the lake fill - kept in place by Lake Shore Drive as it curves east around the northern part of downtown. The straight seawall north of Oak Street precludes a beach, so it sort of pretends to be one. Despite what could easily have been viewed as ugly, I thought it was actually pretty neat and it certainly got its share of use, at least later in the day (these shots are mainly early in the morning). I suppose it was underwater in the mid-1980s when lake levels were high.

St. Joseph

2010-07-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

Silver Beach in St. Joseph was crowded at lunchtime on Saturday when we passed through (more pictures at hshipman).

St. Joseph is on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the St. Joseph River. As at nearby South Haven and New Buffalo (and Michigan City, in Indiana), waves and longshore transport are from north to south, building up sand on the north side of the river mouth jetties. This also used to happen on other side of the lake, at the mouth of the Chicago River.

Geologically, this sand is destined for the south end of the lake, where it will be blown inland to bury 19th century steel mills and freeways under hundred-foot tall dunes.

Point Pelee

2010-07-09T18:00:00.000-07:00

The northern shore of lake Erie (Google Maps) is punctuated by three elegant landforms. The location of each may be determined by glacial features like moraines, but the shape of each is all about wind and waves and moving sediment. There are good bathymetric maps and geologic explanations of Lake Erie at NOAA's NGDC.

Long Point is a spit, neither a simple nor a small one.

Point aux Pins (Rondeau Provincial Park) is an arcuate promontory that might be categorized as a recurved or cuspate spit. Its southeastern shore is composed of a beautiful series of accreted beach ridges, while its western shore is somewhat more tenuous. There is a big offset in the shoreline at the jetties at Erieau and the map on the wall at the Eau Buoy Cafe showed that in 1868 the natural opening was much larger and located pretty much where the town is today.

Point Pelee, where all of the these photos are from, is a large cuspate foreland, tapering to a slender point. It has lost ground, or at least changed shape, over time, making the riprap on the west side of the tip seem both unfortunate and sort of futile. The sinuous tip vanished southward under the waves, tempting me to wade out farther, but the biting flies argued against it.

Point Pelee is the southernmost point in mainland Canada. The country's true southernmost point is a very similar looking spit at the southern tip of Pelee Island, maybe 25 km south of here.

Lake Erie

2010-07-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

This is a more geographically general post than most, since my goal was simply to capture several shots taken as we traveled between the Cape Rondeau area and the western end of the lake. This shoreline consists mainly of bluffs, many of clay or silt, but there are also low beaches, including the large barriers that have formed at Point aux Pins and Point Pelee.

The geography of this shoreline appears to be controlled by larger glacial features and sediment variability, subsequently reshaped by Holocene coastal processes. Humans have left their mark, too, with jetties, lots of groins, and a mish mash of armoring, at least locally. Most of the shoreline development is on the low beaches, probably because the bluffs are eroding quickly enough to discourage building and because the demand for Lake Erie view property isn't the same as on Puget Sound.

The timber groins are at Erie Beach?, just west of Erieau (Aerial).
The bluffs are at Point Alma (Aerial).
The sheetpile groins are on the west side of Point Pelee, near Seacliffe. (Aerial)

Sandbanks

2010-07-08T15:00:00.000-07:00

Sandbanks Provincial Park, on the northeastern shore of Lake Ontario, includes two large sandy swash-aligned barriers with their accompanying dunes. I had been curious to get here since my 2008 trip to Ontario, when these beaches were just too much to add to one trip. But our route from northern New England to Chicago took us along the northern edge of both Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and Sandbanks was a nice respite from the highway and the muggy, hot weather.

Westcott Beach

2010-07-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

Westcott Beach is on the easternmost end of Lake Ontario, just around the corner from Sackets Harbor. This coast is completely new to me, so I don't have any sense whether this sand was brought in or not, although I don't see why this beach couldn't be natural. The aerial photos show plenty of sand in the area and the orientation of this shore to winds coming down the lake is favorable. Of course, in the winter those winds must blast this area, dumping tons of snow and piling slabs of ice up on the shoreline.