Hollywood Beach

Hollywood Beach in Port Angeles is one of those neat little pocket beaches that can form when sediment is trapped against an artificial headland - and which are pretty common in heavily modified shorelines. The beach is neither natural nor intentionally created. It just sort of happened and has evolved to become a neat recreational resource.

The original shoreline was located much farther to the south, nearer the base of the original bluff, but in the early 1900s the Port Angeles shoreline was filled outward and the original beach was buried, along with the remnants of the native village that once lay at the mouth of Ennis Creek.

Karl Wegman and others provide a very nice analysis of the original shoreline and its subsequent reconfiguration, with an emphasis on the archaeological implications at:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/arp.1431/abstract
Also, Peninsula Daily News (May 2010)

Some lower portions of Hollywood Beach were marked off where, earlier this summer, depressions began to appear. There was much speculation about the mysterious sinkholes and I'm not quite sure where it all got left. Because the modern beach is located on top of many feet of fill, there could be any number of things underneath the beach that might give rise to this.  It sounds like one of the most likely explanations is that this is the result of old logs and wood rotting out.

The eastern part of the beach is covered in fine dark wood particles, although I don't know if this came from this location or floated in from elsewhere. Port Angeles Harbor has been in the wood products business for its' entire history and there are no shortage of possible sources of this kind of material.