Ebey's Landing - south

This is the first of three posts from the area around Ebey's Landing, all visited on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I'll try to keep this pretty short, since I've had too many long posts recently and the next couple are also likely to drag on.

The whole stretch north and south of Ebey's is backed by bluffs, but one of the many things that makes the reach interesting is that while in some places the beach runs right up to the base of the slope, in others the beach has built much farther seaward, isolating the bluff toe from wave action. It's interesting on the air photos to compare the line of the bluffs with the line of the beach and speculate about why they diverge.

AERIAL VIEW

The photos in this post are from the beach south of Ebey's Landing, which consists of high bluffs all the way to Camp Casey, two miles farther south. Although the width of the berm varies - and this is reflected in the amount of erosion at the bluff toe - the bluffs in this southern reach generally rise pretty directly from the beach. 

Typical of Puget Sound's glacial stratigraphy, there is a great deal of lateral variability in the exposed units. Till is a relatively minor component of the bluff above (difficult to distinguish in the above photo, it lies below the glacial marine drift that caps the sequence and above the thick sandy unit mid-bluff), but dominates the upper portion of the bluffs farther south (below).