English Bay

Some pictures of First Beach on English Bay in Vancouver from a gray day a couple of weeks ago. I've posted many times from here before (Gravel Beach: English Bay) and don't have anything much to add this time.

But it's a favorite spot, no matter what the weather, and it seemed a nice way to close out 2019.

AERIAL VIEW

K'uuna Llnagaay

I generally would not post a beach that I hadn't actually visited, but I really wanted to work this one in somehow. Everything I know about this place I inferred from the exhibit at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria or from the imagery on Google Maps. The beach caught my eye in part because of the quality of the diorama, in part because the site is located on a small tombolo in a place that I've not yet visited (Haida Gwaii - the Queen Charlotte Islands), and in part because it just nicely illustrates how humans historically may have interacted with the beach.

AERIAL VIEW

The landform itself at K'uuna Llnagaay (also called Skedans) appears to be a double tombolo. These features tend to be pretty stable over time. I like the way the diorama captures the back of the beach without much evidence of either long-term erosion or accretion. The village is built on the backshore, which would have been high and dry in all but the most extreme conditions (large high tide storms or tsunamis). There's a small stream at the west end of the beach that would provide freshwater. Often these are associated with small back-barrier wetlands, but if so, this isn't obvious in either the aerials or the diorama.

If the model is accurate (apparently it was based on old photographs), it looks like the village is located a  discrete back from the edge of the beach. Perhaps the beach had built out since the buildings were constructed, but I like to think that this reflects a deliberate decision to reduce the potential of storm damage (and to provide more usable community space on the waterside of the village).

Sidney

Sidney is located a little north of Victoria on Vancouver Island's Saanich Peninsula. The waterfront looks like it's been filled and pushed out historically, leaving little evidence of the original shoreline (a reminder to do some further sleuthing). Much is now marked by seawalls and a rock revetment, but as often happens in these cases, this an opportunity for this small beach at the end of Beacon Avenue.

AERIAL VIEW

The beach is referred to locally as Glass Beach, which like 'glass' beaches elsewhere, reflects on its human history and the presence of ground-up colored glass (usually old bottles) in the sand.

St. Mary Lake

This will be my last entry from our August excursion to the Gulf Islands. The next post will take us to a very different place.

Every year for twenty years we've been coming back to this beach. Maybe not just for the beach, but to the beach. I posted a more thorough description two years ago:
St. Mary Lake: August 2015

It hasn't changed too much in the last twenty years - geomorphologically. What has changed is the demographics - the little children have grown up and gone off to college and rarely make it back. The parents get older. Old folks stop coming. Younger families take their place.

The beach toys get larger and more interesting.

AERIAL VIEW

The swash zone doesn't shift much on this beach over the summer. Afternoon waves from the south try to smooth out whatever perturbations to the small pocket beach have been created with plastic shovels and buckets in the previous 24 hours. Fine sand, coarse sand, and small gravel sort and resort themselves just as on larger, more energetic beaches.

Beach toys left in shallow water influence wave patterns and sometimes leave strange little promontories, even after the temporary breakwater has been removed. 

Without a little new sand now and then and a summertime of human trampling, this little artificial beach would probably revert pretty quickly to reeds. There are too few waves and not enough sediment for beaches to form on their own.

Shell Beach

I missed this and will try to insert into chronological order, which will probably confuse one or two people who actually read these things as they come out. I am also going to keep the entry very short.

Shell Beach is on the northwest side of the tombolo that connects the main part of Montague Harbor Provincial Park (on Galiano Island) to the Gray Peninsula, which would be an island in the absence of the tombolo. There is a small salt marsh and lagoon, and a second, smaller tombolo, on the more sheltered southeastern side of the barrier beach, facing out into Montague Harbor proper.

AERIAL VIEW

The beach itself is rich, and white, in broken shell - thus it's name, I assume. On a summer afternoon it captures the sun and there were no shortage of people enjoying both the beach and the water. My photos actually come from both days of my visit (my base for my two-day exploration of Galiano was a walk-in campsite in the Park). I went for a paddle in the yellow boat on Monday afternoon, watched the sun set from the beach Monday evening, and came back and walked it on Tuesday afternoon, before heading for the Hummingbird Pub for dinner.

Dionisio Point

Dionisio Provincial Park lies at the northern tip of Galiano Island, across Porlier Pass from Valdez Island to the north. Technically, it's marine access only, but with some sleuthing, there are ways to get there without a boat. But don't tell anyone I told you.

There's a beautiful little tombolo connecting the rocky island (which I think is Dionisio Point proper) to the rest of Galiano. Arguably, one might call it a small cuspate foreland that's trying to become a tombolo, since the tip probably goes underwater at many high tides. The southern side of the spit is somewhat sheltered within a rocky bay, so wave exposure may be greater from the north. The northern beach is more fully developed and there were overwash features consistent with north to south wave action. At the same time the bar at the tip also showed signs of current flow from south to north. This would be an interesting spot to watch at a very high tide.

AERIAL VIEW

Interestingly, the northern beach is also much sandier than the southern one, which consists of a fairly uniform gravel lag. I suspect it takes pretty unusual conditions to move material around very much on the south side, whereas the northern beach looked to be much more active.

The sandstones out at the point displayed the neat tafoni weathering that's so characteristic of these Nanamimo Group rocks.

Besides the tombolo, there was a nice little pocket beach around the corner to the northwest. And in between, what was once a substantial Salish village (Quelus', perhaps linked with nearby modern Penalakut Tribe). Here's a link to an NPR story from a few years back: KUOW, 2011.

As is often the case, there is more about some of these Galiano sites on my companion blog:
hshipman: Galiano 2017

Matthews Beach

This beach at the southern end of Galiano is associated with Mathews Point Regional Park. It's also Shore Access #15, one of many on the island (Capital Regional District: Shore Access).

I've been checking out this beach from the ferry for twenty years as we pass through Active Pass on the way to and from the other islands, but this was my first visit (since it was also my first time on Galiano). The beach usually looks pretty empty, although occasionally I see a few folks who've made it down the steep trail from the road.

AERIAL VIEW

It's a pocket beach - at least it's contained by two rocky headlands with little opportunity for sediment to bypass the bedrock points in the deeper, fast-moving water offshore. But it defies some of the usual stereotypes of pocket beaches.

It's hard to characterize it as swash-aligned since wave action is probably messy and strongly impacted by boat wakes (mainly ferries, but lots of other traffic, too). There's not a lot of fetch across Active Pass's narrow channel and large waves are probably pretty limited. 

Sediment to the beach is provided by eroding bluffs of glacial sediment and possibly from a gully at the west end. The beach generally is sandier at the east end (sand and small gravel); much coarser (large gravel and cobble) at the west. I sort of imagine that any new additions of sediment make up for gradual loss of sediment offshore.

It's a great place to watch ferries - which are frequent.

Morning Beach

I'm playing catch up again. A long road trip intervened, so the next few posts date back to mid-August when we made our annual pilgrimage to Salt Spring Island. This year, I took two days on my own to explore nearby Galiano Island.

Morning Beach, not surprisingly, faces east and on a less hazy day one would probably look directly across the Strait of Georgia at Mount Baker. 

AERIAL VIEW

Like so many pocket beaches in the Gulf Islands, this one is contained by resistant sandstone headlands that reflect the regional strike of the folded rocks (Cretaceous Nanaimo Formation). Sandstone ribs, also on the same strike, break up the beach at the south end. The beach is pretty sandy, which I suppose is some combination of glacial cover and eroded bedrock.

First Beach

First Beach, which is also simply called English Bay Beach, is the largest of the sculpted beaches along Vancouver's English Bay. As with all these beaches, it faces directly into the largest waves, otherwise the beach would leak out at one end or the other.

AERIAL VIEW

Saturday afternoon is pretty much just a sunny day at the beach and the tide rising over the low tide terrace is warm enough to swim in - and many folks do. By late afternoon, the crowds thicken. I do my best to estimate where the water level will be when the fireworks start, so we can be in the right place at 10PM, and the other several hundred thousand people are behind us, not in front of us.

By early Sunday morning, the beach is clean, empty, and groomed (for more on grooming, see English Bay: August 2006).

False Creek

Just a few shots of the edge of False Creek - a wonderful shoreline, albeit not quite the marshy estuary it once was. There's really not enough wave action to create beaches in here, even if the configuration and the profiles were more amenable, so the result is an interesting assortment of engineering treatments.

AERIAL VIEW

Here are some links back to some earlier False Creek posts:
Creekside: October 2011
Yaletown: October 2011
False Creek: August 2010

English Bay

I've posted many times about many different beaches on English Bay - I suppose they are my favorite urban beaches, we visit them regularly, and I always take too many pictures. Here are a few, from the last weekend in July.

Most of the photos are of Sunset Beach, on the north side of the inner portion of the bay. Including the little beach that peters out up against the Burrard Street Bridge and the entrance to False Creek.

The last photo is Hadden Park's Dog Beach, just across the water in Kitsilano. It also appears in Kitsilano: April 2016.

AERIAL VIEW

Gravel Beach: Vancouver (lots of beaches, lots of posts)

I'll follow up (I think) with some photos of First Beach, also on English Bay, and several non-beaches on False Creek.