Carkeek Park

This afternoon after work I headed for Carkeek instead of going straight home. It was raining, as it has been for 23 days, and I had hopes of actually watching a slug of dirt and trees come down the bank. It wasn't raining too hard, though, and I settled for a walk down the tracks to last Friday's landslide just south of MilePost 10. No trains today, because last night there were more slides farther north.

There were several separate slides, all pretty small but still oozing mud. What came over the wall and the trip wires must have been small trees and a few tens of cubic yards of mud and wet sand. Most had been cleared from the tracks and either carted away or placed on the beach. The waves have had several days to rework whatever material made it over the seawall.

I wonder what this stretch of shoreline would have looked like in 1890, before the Seattle and Montana (later the Great Northern) was built. It might have been more like the reach north of Kingston, between Apple Cove Point and Eglon. Similar exposure, similar geology. Lots of slides and lots of sand and large wood on the beach.