Marine View Drive

The Dick Gilmur Shoreline Access point is located along Marine View Drive on the north side of Commencement Bay, on the way out towards Browns Point. It's a relatively recent soft shore project intended to restore a more natural beach while also allowing for a small parking area and kayak launch.

AERIAL VIEW

One of the questions that keeps coming up for me is how to catalog and disseminate information about the large number of soft shore and beach restoration projects going on around Puget Sound. Overall, it's a remarkably positive story that needs to be told. It would provide people with design ideas and inspiration to do more projects and to do them better. It might provide an inventory from which people could choose sites for monitoring, for documentation, or simply for visiting.

But this has proven difficult. The number of projects is large, but they vary enormously and there is much disagreement about what types of projects should be included and how to assess performance. Many are poorly known and poorly documented. There is sensitivity among funders and landowners and contractors about possible problems and this makes it difficult to discuss the less successful projects (or more commonly, successful projects with unsuccessful elements), even if those are the ones we would all learn the most from.