Chimacum

The pictures in this post are from just a little farther north than those in the previous post, since Irondale and Chimacum are just different ends of the same beach. While this is a frequent stop when I'm visiting the Port Townsend area, I just realized that I hadn't posted from here for more than ten years (the project itself only occurred in 2005-2006)!

Chimacum Beach: June 2008
Chimacum Beach: July 2006
Chimacum Beach: May 2006

Like at Irondale, the beach is almost entirely sand dredged up from the bay a very long time ago and I suspect most of the clam shell on this beach probably came along with that sand.

The back-barrier wetland, behind the spit that formed following the initial project, is pretty high so only the northern portion, near the mouth, gets much saltwater inundation. The central portion looks fresh. And the southernmost portion is more meadow than wetland.

Chimacum Creek exits from its beautiful little forested estuary at the very north end - I've been meaning for years to come back and explore with the kayak. Maybe this summer - when I'll have a little more time to play with!

Irondale

Irondale and Chimacum are the southern and northern halves of the same beach, at least as I see it, and as they have before, they will generate two posts. Short posts - since I'm way behind and I promised myself I would write less this year.

Irondale is the site of a large 19th-century iron smelter which was finally cleaned up a few years ago after more than a century of abandonment.

Irondale (March 2013) (which in turn links further back)

The old brick beehive ovens continue to gradually erode onto the beach, some of the smelter slag still crops out as ledges on the beach, and a number of old stone foundations pieces were left behind. But the beach is doing great. This is an unusually sandy system (by Puget Sound standards) - the virtue of having been constructed a century ago with sand (and clam shell) dredged from the bottom of the bay. 

There's a gentle promontory in the central portion of the site where the berm inevitably wants to shift landward, but this is neither rapid nor a problem. A few of the logs that were placed along the berm have been undermined and as I recall there might be some sort of monitoring well(?) that may in time be exposed (if so, it will make a nice erosion reference).

The Irondale Beach continues seamlessly to the north, eventually becoming Chimacum Beach, where we'll go next.

Fort Worden

A week and half ago, I got to spend two days at Fort Worden, a (very) little of which actually got spent on the beach. This is a familiar site (searching the blog for Fort Worden or Point Wilson turns up some related posts) and one I often use to illustrate how structures can impede littoral drift and how shorelines respond.

AERIAL VIEW

The Port Townsend Marine Science Center now occupies the end of the pier, but the structure itself has a long military history associated the Fort. At some point, planks were placed between the pier's pilings, most likely to reduce sedimentation in the small boat basin tucked in behind it. This resulted in a wide beach accumulating on the south side (sediment arrives from Port Townsend and the Chetzamoka Bluffs from this direction), and a substantial offset in the shoreline to the northeast (towards Point Wilson itself).

Every decade or so, people start wondering whether something can be done to alleviate some of the inconvenient geomorphic ramifications of the pier (and the associated boat basin and launch ramp). Trouble is, some things are hard to undo without creating other problems.

Fort Worden

It seems like all my recent posts have been from the Strait - the Miller Peninsula, the Elwha, and now, the northeastern corner of the Quimper Peninsula. But recent is relative. This Saturday excursion to Fort Worden was back on the 10th, but if you've been paying attention the last ten years, you know that sometimes my posts run a bit late. Always in order, but often delayed. If you've been following along, you also know that my photos and my narrative don't always align terribly well.

The beach walk was part of a grand loop around the north side of Fort Worden. We began with low tide on the north side of Point Wilson, where we could look at the curiously distinct and squared off boulder field and the wood debris sticking out of the beach along its western edge. Bulldozers, faults, or coastal retreat across a back-barrier lagoon that used to sit below a steep forested slope? And how does that relate to the big divot in the bluff that looks so much like a singular landslide, but which doesn't explain why the coastline itself jogs as well.

AERIAL VIEW

The beach along North Beach is great, with sand, gravel, big boulders, and occasionally glimpses of the underlying platform. But it's somewhat overshadowed - figuratively and literally - by the bluffs themselves. At the eastern end, it looks like Whidbey Formation, including a surprisingly continuous peat layer a few feet above beach level, overlain by Vashon stuff. But as you move west, the layer cake has been disturbed and late glacial Everson (so I'm told) appears - mainly gravels, but with some amazing ripups of the underlying glacial material. Something pretty exciting happened here during the waning stages of the last glaciation - it took a lot of water moving very fast to leave that kind of deposit (and it's much better exposed than my last visit). Is this evidence of Puget Sound (Lake Russell?) spilling out around the edge of the retreating ice? Or something else.

The walk back along the top edge of the bluff was a lesson in periodically relocated fence lines on the bluff (always to the south) and big artillery (the big guns are all gone, but the batteries and the views remain).

Credit for the day goes to Michael and Kitty and Leslie and all the other folks at:
The Jefferson Land Trust Geology Group

Maynard's Beach

Two weeks ago, I got a chance to revisit this restoration site on Discovery Bay (Previous post: Maynard's Lagoon: January 2015). It's right off of U.S. 101, just past the old railroad cars where, at least in the past, you could get an ice cream cone on the way back from the Peninsula. This is actually just one of several recent restoration projects at the head of the bay - all carried out by NOSC.

The configuration of the site was largely shaped by the railroad and the old mill. The mill is all gone, as are the tracks, but the railroad grade itself now helps create a series of lagoons (pocket estuaries, as we often call them here). The result is a fairly natural interpretation of a largely artificial shoreline.

In my earlier post, I had suggested that the tracks might have followed a longer spit across the mouth of the main lagoon, but I realize that the remnant spit at the northeast end of the lagoon (on the bayside of the railroad causeway) is probably all there was.

AERIAL VIEW

There's not much wave action here and it may take a while for the beach to sort itself out, but the vegetation is beginning to take off. A large portion of the beach is already sprouting new salicornia (pickle weed), foreshadowing its future as a marsh as much as a beach. This site has a little of everything - a low energy beach, fringing marshes, a stream, multiple lagoons, and upland forest. It will be fun to watch it evolve in the coming years.

Tarboo Bay

Tarboo Bay is located at the northernmost end of much larger Dabob Bay, sheltered behind an elegant series of spits.

AERIAL VIEW

This small site at the very head of the bay was recently restored by the Northwest Watershed Institute, the local organization that has spearheaded so much restoration work in this area. A year ago, there was a building built on piles over the water and an old timber bulkhead, but the structures have since been removed and the bank and the old driveway have been replanted with native trees and shrubs. In a few years, it will blend perfectly with the adjacent landscape.

The now unprotected bank is eroding, supplying coarse gravel to build a small beach and sand that is reshaping a tiny beach nearby. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the marsh to recolonize the beach surface - wave energy is sufficiently low here that vegetation is the natural end point rather than a beach, something seen by looking at the adjacent shoreline to the north where marsh grass obscures the gravel beach beneath.

Dabob Bay

I don't get to this remote corner of Puget Sound very often, and not many others do either, so it remains a relatively pristine landscape. The last time I visited was 8 years ago, on a day a little bleaker than this one (Broad Spit: October 2007).

AERIAL VIEW

One of the things that struck me on that trip was how difficult it is to find small stream mouths on Puget Sound - even way back here - that haven't been significantly modified. They were the natural place to sluice logs out of the hills, to homestead, to construct shingle mills and oyster farms, and later, to build vacation homes. Valley bottoms were cleared, streams channels were relocated, and spits and small estuaries were buried. Reference sites for restoration projects are hard to find.

Once riprap, now a beach

Local groups, along with DNR and the Nature Conservancy and others, have patched together a large mosaic of forested uplands, beaches, and tidelands here in northern Dabob Bay and are in the process of restoring the more disturbed sites. Some work has already been done here - a bulkhead was removed and some roads were taken out from an earlier development effort on the hillside. But now there's an opportunity to do more and I'm looking forward to coming back in a few years to see what it looks like.

Elmira Street

Elmira Street Park, on the north edge of Port Townsend, is locally known as The End of the World. This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it's certainly the end of the trail. It got a lot of attention two winters ago when some large chunks fell away (see video from 2013 below).

I visited the top briefly in April*, but stayed back from the edge and didn't linger, even though the likelihood of anything happening during my brief stay was low. But it's always hard to know how undercut the bluff is or what might trigger a collapse.

These bluffs of glacial drift are fairly coherent, form a steep face, and tend to fail as large slabs. These topples from the upper half of the bluff are encouraged by gradual erosion of the underlying units and by wet periods and/or freeze-thaw events.  The collapsed material is quickly redistributed by waves and in this case most is destined for Point Wilson a couple of miles to the east.

There is a small concrete observation post dating to World War II at the edge of the bluff. Rough estimates of erosion rates along here are 6 inches per year, but that suggest the structure was built 30-40' back from the edge (in the forest?)  I suspect it was built closer than that - better views of the water - and retreat isn't as rapid as those earlier estimates.  Dramatic when large slabs fall, but not the end of the world.

* I'm embarrassed to point out that this visit occurred way back in early April. This spring things fell behind, in part because of a slow-moving hard disk failure that took a long time to diagnose, then to replace. I liked my little Sony laptop, but when faced with the need to retire it, I decided to switch back to a Mac. For those who care, I rely heavily on Picasa to manage photos and it seems to run very nicely on the Apple.

Over the next week or two? I will try to gradually backfill both this blog and my companion hshipman blog with posts I drafted this spring while my hard disk was grinding to a halt.

Maynard's Lagoon

The old railroad followed the edge of Discovery Bay, cutting across the salt marsh at the head of the inlet and isolating some small estuarine lagoons (maybe just one, originally) along the southwestern side of the bay. The old mill (Maynard's, I guess) sat along the railroad, perched on what was probably the original spit. A mill pond was created behind the mill at one end of the lagoon.

The mill had pretty much dismantled itself, but the remnants remained until NOSC (see below) went to work this fall and removed the old structures and much of the old fill. They dropped the elevations to more closely match the geometry of the old spits and they replumbed the small stream mouth and the estuaries.

AERIAL VIEW

This is a fairly sheltered site since it's tough to generate big waves in this corner of Discovery Bay, but there will still be enough energy to gradually rearrange the beach.  But the bigger story will probably be the riparian vegetation and the fringing marsh.

Walking the beach last Tuesday, there were a few pieces of the old timber structures, and the shape of the shoreline still mimics some of the historic fill, but in a few years, the human history will be almost entirely erased. (The photos were all taken the same day - the foggy one in the morning, the others on the way home).

For more about this project, and about the North Olympic Salmon Coalition, check out:

Lower Discovery Bay Estuary Restoration

Third Beach

We had a pretty benign January, but it seems like the last two weeks has just been one new storm every 24 hours.  Fortunately, many hit hardest at night, leaving us some very pretty days in between the squalls.  Early Sunday morning, I took advantage of a lull in the action to drive out to La Push. Saturday night's storm had subsided and the drive across 101 was beautiful with clear patches and a little sunshine and fresh snow low on the hills.

I was on Third Beach by 11:00. The skies were gray - but dry - and the tide was pretty high, but it was a great dose of the Olympic Coast, which is exactly what I'd come looking for.

Third Beach, like most of the beaches along this coast, is a glorified pocket beach. Its shape is largely defined by rocky headlands - that confine the beaches - and the interaction of Pacific Ocean waves with the complicated bathymetry and clusters of sea stacks - that shapes the beaches. Ultimately, this coastline is probably a reflection of the geology -- an assortment of resistant sedimentary blocks (the headlands and stacks) with much softer stuff in between (the bays and beaches).

AERIAL VIEW

There's a waterfall at the south end - basically a hanging valley where the ocean has cut landward faster than the small stream can cut downward. The waves had cut into a very high sandy berm near the stream mouth - providing some indication of how dynamic this beach must be. Many of bluffs along here are actively collapsing onto the beach. Some appear to be fairly slow-moving slides, but there was a big pile down the beach that looked like it must have come down both quickly and recently.

The tide was too high and the waves too big to explore safely and I look forward to coming back for longer in nice weather and when the tide is out. But it's days like this when stuff actually happens!

By the time I got to Second Beach, an hour or so later, the wind had picked up (the tide, too, there was little beach to be seen). And by the time I got into La Push, the next storm had fully arrived. I ate my sandwich in my car out at the jetty with the wipers on high and the car rocking in the wind. La Push is worthy of a whole post in itself - several, actually - but it will have to wait for a trip where I can get some better pictures.

I drove over to Rialto Beach, but between the storm, the water level, and all those big logs on the move, I decided against walking north to Hole in the Wall. Next time! It was a very wet drive back to Seattle.

Kinney Point

Kinney Point is the southern tip of Marrowstone Island and is actually a Washington State Park. It has no upland access, but it does host a Washington Water Trails campsite.  On my long walk around the south end of the island, this was the final turn before the home stretch back to the car.

Kinney Point is a double point, with a little notch in between.  As with so much of this end of the island, most of the upper bluff is glacial drift, but the bottom few feet is older sedimentary rock. I think the shape of the point reflects a change in the resistance of the toe to wave action.  A layer of sandstone anchors the eastern bump of the point, but it dips to the west and vanishes below beach level, exposing what appears to be a more erodible, finer grained unit (mudstone?) on the western bump.  At the same time, the amount of water seeping out over this unit increases significantly in the same direction and maybe that also affects erosion patterns.

Google Maps:  AERIAL VIEW
Ecology Coastal Atlas:  2006 AERIAL PHOTO

On the western side of the point, both the till and the older rocks seem pretty messed up, and my gut told me they were suggesting a more complicated story than the previous several miles of fairly predictable layer cake geology.

There are plenty of things that influence the shape of the coastline.  Around here, the primary factor is the basic form it inherited from the glacier.  But wave action, the resistance of the shoreline to erosion, and the width/height of the beach (which buffers the effect of wave action), are all important in controlling relative erosion rates and therefore the evolution of the shoreline. Here on the south end of Marrowstone, the overall shape reflects its glacial origins, but it seems like the geology of the bluff toe (largely influenced by the presence and type of harder pre-glacial sediments) is an important factor in some of the secondary bumps and wiggles.

Heading back northwest, the beach changes dramatically.  The bluff vanishes entirely at the campsite and there is even peat and wood exposed on the beach, probably the abandoned relic of the marshy swale still seen at the modern shoreline. Continuing north, the beach grows to become a barrier beach that extends 500 meters along the shoreline before reconnecting with the bluffs downdrift.

Google Maps:  AERIAL VIEW
Ecology Coastal Atlas:  2006 AERIAL PHOTO