Old Fort Townsend

The trail down the bluff follows the old road down to the pier. The pier is gone, but there are a few picnic tables on a little lawn that sticks 60 feet across the beach. Riprap and old concrete keeps it from washing away too fast. Most of the fill could be removed and there would still be room for a picnic tables and a much friendlier path to the beach than scrambling over the rocks.

There are beautiful undeveloped bluffs both north, towards the mill at Glen Cove, and south, towards Kala Point. The platform from here north broadens and the falling tide was exposing extensive sand and gravel bars. As you walk north, you pass some steep bluffs and recent landslides, and then the berm widens to form a narrow fringing barrier that extends 0.5 mile along the shoreline. Young cedars, some of which have sprouted in the old logs that stranded on the berm, are well established along this flat ribbon of backshore at the base of the old bluff. Some of these cedars were dying, perhaps as erosion reclaims this beach or as the salt water reaches farther landward. I suspect this wide beach may be a fairly modern phenomenon, dating from earlier in the century when logs were rafted offshore of this beach and the wave regime may have been quite different.