Pigeon Creek Beach

Here's a nice example of a small beach project that almost no one knows about. It's an artificial gravel beach at a hard-to-find public access on Everett's industrial waterfront. The initial project was done in conjunction with an outfall in the very early 2000s and then was revisited a few years ago.

AERIAL VIEW

The beach lies in a corner created by the railroad grade and the large projecting fill associated with the Port of Everett. While the orientation is favorable to maintain some sort of beach, they've had problems here maintaining a sustainable profile. I suspect they need smaller gravel and more room - the latter of which may simply not be possible on this site. It's not just the geometry of the upland, but also the proximity of Pigeon Creek, which would be a constant sink for sediment were the beach to extend much farther west.

I actually think there's a nice location for another beach just around the corner to the north - maybe toss in a few thousand cubic yards of sandy gravel and let it sort itself out.

Howarth Park

The railroad and the high bluffs make access to the beach between Seattle and Everett a tricky proposition, but there are places where stream valleys, pedestrian overpasses, and public parks conspire to make it possible - Carkeek Park, Picnic Point, and Howarth Park, for example.

The natural stream mouth at Howarth is obscured beneath the railroad grade and the big pile of dirt that surrounds the stair tower -- the creek tumbles out of a long culvert onto the riprap. From the look of the wetland next to the parking lot, this stream might have had a sufficiently low gradient to result in a nice little estuary (probably behind a small spit - sort of like the one down the beach at Merrill and Ring Creek).

Jetty Island

Saturday afternoon I took the kayak up to Everett and paddled across to Jetty Island. In the summer, the City runs a ferry over to the island and the main beach on the west side fills up with people enjoying the warm (relatively) water flooding in over the broad sand flats, but on this trip I had the whole place to myself.

The tide was high, so there wasn't much beach to walk on (and the upland portion of the island, at least the north end, is North America's densest thicket of Himalayan blackberry). I walked up to the northeastern tip of the island,
which was littered with remnants of old structures and lots of big wood, washed down the river and stranded on the beach. Then I wandered back to the main beach, the spit, and the lagoon.

Everett is located just south of the mouth of the Snohomish River (as was the historic Tulalip community of Hibulb, long before Everett Colby's father founded the city). The shallow subtidal foredelta of the river extends out into Port Gardner, making deep water access difficult, so a century ago, a jetty (training structure or breakwater?) was constructed to channel the main stem of the river southward along the waterfront (see the aerial photo linked to the title of this post). Dredged sand was placed on the western side of this structure and gradually a new island was built. In 1989, the Port of Everett used the dredged material to create an artificial berm - basically a spit, that in turn formed a large tidal lagoon.

Jetty Island is a Puget Sound anomaly. It is all sand, river sand, unlike most of our gravelly beaches, which get their sediment from eroding bluffs and small, steep streams. It is completely artificial - this entire area was shallow sand flats historically. And it is the largest beach nourishment project on the Sound and the only one built from dredged river sand. It is a frequently cited example (particularly by the Corps) of beneficial use (of dredged sediment).

Some folks note that the ecological picture painted at Jetty Island isn't really true restoration (they're right). Others seem more put off by the blackberries and invasive species than they are impressed by the salt marsh and the birds. And some people are just leery of pretty much everything the Corps of Engineers does (not an unwarranted skepticism). But ultimately, this is a pretty neat place. Maybe they ought to build something like this outboard of the Shilshole breakwater or along a section of the railroad grade!