Golden Gardens

January 1st, 2020. New Year's Day. The sun came out. I was already in Ballard and somewhat impulsively decided to go to the beach. I wasn't the only one with that idea. 

Golden Gardens Park is located on Meadow Point, just north of the big Shilshole Bay Marina. It's got a long history, some of which I've mentioned in previous posts, but in the end, it is one of Seattle's nicest beaches and a great example of a fairly unconstrained urban beach. So many urban beaches in other cities are pocket beaches stuck between piers or heavily nourished beaches on intensely developed waterfronts. It's not that Golden Gardens has lost it's connectivity with adjacent beaches (it has) or that it hasn't been modified or nourished (it has, but not much), but it still looks and feels like a relatively natural beach. As long as you sort of ignore the marina, the railroad, and the crowds!

AERIAL VIEW

Previous Posts: Gravel Beach: Golden Gardens

It was a beautiful day. Kids were playing in the water (barefoot and sometimes wearing down jackets). Families had gathered to burn their Christmas Trees. A few people were playing volleyball. The playground was full. So was the parking lot.

Lincoln Park

Lincoln Park is one of the better documented beaches on Puget Sound, although much of what was written is now 25 years old. And apparently, this is the first time I've included it in the blog. A good reminder that there are just too many beaches.

The glacial landscape of West Seattle juts out into Puget Sound on the north side of Fauntleroy Cove. As commonly occurs on promontories on Puget Sound, a very small depositional landform - a cuspate foreland - has formed at its tip (this is in contrast to Brace Point, to the south, which is a much larger cuspate foreland). You may have learned in Beaches 101 that headlands get eroded and bays get filled in until the whole coast is straight, which may be true if you're on a coast where large waves approach straight on. But here on Puget Sound, where waves approach at a strong angle to the coast, it seems that sometimes sediment is attracted to the points, not removed from them. Or at least that's sure what it looks like to me.

AERIAL VIEW

The photos show both the more heavily visited south beach and the somewhat less explored north beach. And the riprap that protects the point itself. Note that this landform was perfectly happy without riprap, despite its exposed position, for hundreds of years. The riprap probably reflects the need to protect the walkway, which was likely built over the original backshore. Colman Pool (saltwater) replaces whatever little lagoon probably once occupied the same place on this landscape.

The south beach is the main story here. During the 1930s, the WPA built the stone bulkhead (now largely buried) and the promenade. Over the next few decades, the beach eroded and dropped in elevation and by the 1970s the wall had been repaired many times. Old photos show the beach far below the top of the wall. When Seattle approached the Corps of Engineers for help, the Corps proposed beach nourishment. Resource agencies pushed back - the idea of burying the beach under fill was unthinkable (they preferred the idea of a riprap apron at the toe of the wall).

Fortunately, nourishment won out over riprap. The initial placement in 1988 was large - something like 80,000 cubic yards - but the few subsequent renourishments have been much smaller. And despite some wrinkles along the way, I think the overall project remains a big success story. I think it was critical in reshaping the opinions of the agencies about the potential value of nourishment. This was also because monitoring, required of the original project, led to some good early work on Puget Sound beach biota and their response to seawalls and nourishment.

Wolf Bauer, who had been advocating and building gravel beaches on Puget Sound for more than a decade before the work at Lincoln Park, was a bit skeptical of the design. He had some valid gripes (the berm was too high, for one, so it immediately developed a large scarp), but I suppose he also just sort of enjoyed poking the Corps (don't we all?).

Most folks walking the beach last Sunday (the last day of winter), probably had no idea of the beach's history. I don't recall if the park has any interpretive signs showing the 1930s construction or the engineers standing below the towering bulkhead in the 1970s.

There's more about Lincoln Park - it's relationship with the sandier Fauntleroy Cove to the south, the asymmetry of the north and south beaches, and the heavily developed shoreline to the north of the Park along Beach Drive (which is also the story of the uplifted terrace of the Seattle Fault). Maybe another time.

Seahurst Park

Last Monday, I dropped M at the airport early, lingered over coffee at the Burien Press, and then drove down the hill to Seahurst Park. Burien got more snow than the rest of us on New Year's, so the road was still pretty icy. The sun wouldn't come over the bluff for an hour or two, so it was dark. The tide was pretty high, so not a lot of beach was showing. And it was cold. I guess it wasn't surprising that it was so quiet.

The beach appears to have naturalized nicely since the project was wrapped up in 2014 (wow - it's already been more than 2 years!). A more distinct berm has built up in front of the wetland in the central portion of the north beach. The logs have distributed themselves more naturally across the berm. The northern stream mouth has continued to rearrange itself, much as the larger stream to the south has always done. The plantings have taken off. And it looks like there's been some sliding on the bluff at the north end of the park.

Previous Post:  Spring 2015

AERIAL VIEW

Speaking of the larger stream - the main one that comes down the ravine with the road - the water level in the small wetland/lagoon at it's mouth was very high and was overflowing across the berm in several locations (the stream mouth in the lead photo is the smaller, northern one, not this one). Some of this looked like it might be the function of some human modifications at the primary outlet, where amateur engineers had been practicing building dams. 

Cultural artifact at the north end

Seahurst Park

I visited Seahurst Park three times this spring - once between meetings in other places, once for a meeting at the park, and once for a great sunset with M after an impromptu trip to Zippy's Burgers in White Center. These photos date to first of these, way back in the third week of April.

The work at the north end was largely wrapped up at the end of last summer (Seahurst: August 2014) and the beach has had a winter to begin to sort itself out.  The beach itself looks nice - with the well-sorted gravel giving way to bands and patches of sandier material. The berm has readjusted a little, possibly at the expense of the skinny back-beach wetland, and the restored stream mouth is looking very natural, with flow disappearing into the gravel berm.

The south end shows little evidence of the old seawall that was removed in 2005 and I think most folks wouldn't have a clue of its history. The beach itself looks fine, but the toe of the bluff looks quite different than the toe of the unaltered bluff south of the park. That would be fun to come back and elaborate on in a future post when I can do a better comparison.

Guerrilla Films has just released a nice documentary about the park and its restoration:
Local Treasure: Trailer on Vimeo

Showboat Beach

For years, the old Showboat Theater floated along Portage Bay, in the midst of the oceanography and fisheries buildings, but by the 1990s, I guess they were afraid it would sink - or maybe it actually had sunk?

The old showboat went away and it was replaced by a small park and a beach, just down the hill from the South Campus Center. It's a nice place for students to hang out on nice sunny days - so it was empty on this visit.

AERIAL VIEW

I took advantage of a break at the Landslide Forum (Seattle Times article) to wander down with my coffee to see how the beach was doing. It's doing okay. I suppose it's a pretty confusing place to be a beach - a little bit of wind wave action from the south and a constant stream of boat wakes - and then add to that the strange plumbing of the Lake Washington system, which maintains higher water levels in the summer and lower ones in the winter (thus the wider beach in this photo).

Seahurst Park

These photos were taken way back on August 27th, just a few days after Seahurst Park reopened after being closed for year. At some point, I'll come back and post a longer follow up on the recent project, but I'm still in catch-up mode and will stick to little more than a few photos.

The bottom line is that the beach has been restored, an awful lot of old seawall and riprap and fill removed, and a small stream daylighted. All the responses I overheard from the folks wandering around were positive, although I suspect some were also just trying to line up what they were seeing with what they remembered.  The seawall was a useful reference point and now most of it is gone.

AERIAL VIEW

Seahurst Park: January 2014 (during construction, with links to earlier posts)

The Portage

Portage is one of those names that crops up in many different places - but the three that come to mind on Puget Sound (I'm not counting Portage Bay below UW) are all tombolos, or at least were tombolos at one time). All three were places where simply lugging your canoe over the beach berm saved you several miles of paddling in rough water.

One of these is at the tip of the Lummi Peninsula at the north end of Bellingham Bay, where a spit (really just a bar, but that's another story - one I don't know) connects to Portage Island. Another is the passage between Indian and Marrowstone Island, which was closed by a barrier beach until the Corps of Engineers excavated the channel and built jetties early in the 20th century.

The third is this low isthmus that connects (or separates, depending on your perspective) Vashon and Maury Islands. As with all of these, there is always some debate about whether historically there was an open channel, but in general, maintaining a channel in these situations would be difficult, as the beach would tend to close up the gap pretty quickly. There has to be a pretty strong tidal differential to maintain enough flow to keep something like this open (or a complete lack of sediment).  That doesn't mean that sometimes storm waves and high tides would not have periodically washed over the top, but that's not the same as a navigable connection unless you're in a kayak and willing to do battle with the logs.

AERIAL VIEW

The north side of this tombolo would have been the primary berm since the exposure is greater and there is much more robust beach.  The south side lies within Quartermaster Harbor and is fairly sheltered.  Typically, in a situation such as this, the wetland that formed in association with the tombolo would have drained to the southern, more protected side.  Trails across these features become roads and a desire to maintain access during storm conditions leads them to be elevated and armored.  Here, it's still only a short hop from the beach on the north side of the road to the remaining wetland on the south side.  And the south side, like any south-facing beach at the north end of an embayment on Puget Sound, is a magnet for anything that floats and blows across the surface of the water.  Logs, old styrofoam floats, plastic water bottles, sneakers, tennis balls.

Dockton

Two weeks ago (I hope readers don't think this blog is live - or even almost live), I was on Vashon to give a talk and had a chance to swing by Dockton, where another small restoration project has just happened.  For the "before," check out my post from a few years ago:

Dockton: May 2008

Note that the restoration project is just west of the boat ramp and county park - there is another, larger restoration project just waiting to happen under that parking lot!

The county has recently pulled out the old riprap and excvated an s-shaped channel to capture the upland runoff.  The hydrology may be defined as much by culverts under the road (which lies just uphill) as by the original stream network.  The result is a small stream mouth estuary - or what will become one. Besides the channel, the beach berm has been reshaped to form a small spit.  Waves (what few there are here) and tides will spend a year or two reshaping the berm, but the bulk of the changes from here on out will be in the vegetation and in what ever fauna choose to colonize or pass through.  It will be fun to watch.

AERIAL VIEW

Golden Gardens

Two posts back, at Lake Quinault, I noted that beaches are easy to make.  But that doesn't mean that they are simple, that they are all the same, or that they fail to exhibit an amazing amount of small-scale spatial and temporal variability.

A late afternoon walk at Golden Gardens found lots of stuff happening - much of which will be erased within a few tide cycles. And replaced with something else.

Waves on a rising tide will sometimes leave a swash bar like this sandy one lapped up onto the beach face.  Perhaps the band of gravel at the water line was the coarse lag left behind when that rising tide pushed the sand up the beach.  Seepage from the beach face formed complex alluvial channels on the lower beach face.  A high tide gravel ridge to the north recorded the story of strong southerly waves during a recent high tide.

Meadow Point is a barrier beach that curves sharply and there are big differences as you walk from the sandy beach on the south to the gravelly one on the north. By the way, this northern beach was probably always coarser than the southern one, but the current pattern was reinforced by the gravel that was added in the mid 1990s to address the chronic erosion of the northern shore (possibly attributable to the loss of sediment from the north after the railroad was built, but that's another story).

AERIAL VIEW

Seahurst Park

After many years of planning, the big beach project at the north end of Seahurst Park is finally underway.  The old seawall is coming out and a new beach is going in.  Right now the beach is off limits - and pretty much obscured by big piles of gravel and rock and lots of bright orange and yellow machinery.

Here's a post from this fall, before construction started:
Seahurst, October 2013
(and from there you can link back to earlier posts)

The south end (where the beach was restored in 2005) was looking great, but was awfully empty with access to the park closed off. I actually walked in from Eagle Landing to the south. Which qualified as my exercise for the day (hshipman:  Eagle Landing).

West Seattle

This winter's highest tide was supposed to arrive at dawn last Sunday morning, but the clear cold weather came with high pressure and that meant that a tide destined for 13.2' in Seattle barely made it to 12', a modest high tide at best.

Our best high tides seem to come when weather and pressure combine to lift a less than awesome tide into the truly unexpected range.  Like December 17th, 2012, when the 12' tide reached 14.5' (Whidbey Island).  Or when an El Niño elevates west coast water levels for weeks, like in January 2010 (Alki).

It seems like every winter for 20 years I've headed out at daybreak in late December or early January, hoping to see the Sound overflow. It's rarely spectacular, but getting out on the beach - or maybe getting outside at all - at dawn is still pretty special.  These shots are from Sunday morning, from Harbor Ave and from Alki Beach.

This post is a bit of an experiment and one that may get revised. I'm trying to post from a new app on an iPad, rather than my conventional use of blogger on the laptop. I'll let you know!

Seahurst Park

In 2005, a long section of riprap and gabions was removed from the south end of Seahurst Park.  Over the years since, the beach has recovered beautifully and the forest has grown back along the toe of the bluff.  I've posted photos of this section before and I'm sure I will again
(Seahurst:  February 2009).

Google Maps:  AERIAL VIEW

But now the story has shifted to the north end, where a complicated suite of old fill, concrete seawall, and riprap have left a strained landscape.  This month, the City of Burien and the Corps of Engineers will begin to remove all of this and by next spring a broad beach will take its place (assuming Congress gets around to doing its job without too much more foolishness).

Seattle Times (9-14-2013)

This is a complicated site - much more so than the south end.  A stream mouth (still in pretty good shape) empties out onto this beach and is probably a major influence on the morphology of the downdrift (northerly) beach.  Some of the old infrastructure will remain (a marine education center, a major sewer line, etc) and that definitely constrains some of the restoration actions, but overall, I suspect the result will give visitors something wonderful they may not even have realized they didn't have (sort of what happened at the south end).

This is being billed as the largest beach restoration project on Puget Sound.  If it's not the biggest, it's certainly close, although sometimes our memories are limited by the context. The 1980 restoration of the south beach at West Point in Seattle was on the same scale, but that was in another era!

West Point (Coastal Care, November 2010)