South Beach

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!