Port Gamble

There is a neat little beach hidden at the bottom of Teekalet Bluff in Port Gamble. People often stop to take in the view from the top, since it's a great place to monitor everything coming in and out of Hood Canal -- war canoes, sailing ships, nuclear submarines. But not so many people visit this little beach. I've known it was here for a long time, but this was the first time I'd actually checked it out.

AERIAL VIEW

When the northern shoreline of Port Gamble was developed, fill was extended out over the beach and protected with large rock (and other junk). This projection blocks the eastward drift and over time, a small wedge of beach has built out in front of the forested toe of the bluff.

I doubt there's much sediment being transported along this shoreline. It's at the end of a long littoral cell that begins farther south on Hood Canal, but I suspect the transport rates are higher where the southerly waves can act more effectively. Much of the sediment probably stalls out in the vicinity of Salsbury Point (a mile west of here), since there isn't much wave action to urge it along this north-facing shoreline (something similar happens between Point Elliott in Mukilteo and the Port of Everett, so I suppose this beach is a bit analogous to Pigeon Creek Beach), though none of this probably makes sense unless you look at the map).

It's possible that some of the sediment on this beach now makes itself around the riprap, but the fill extends into relatively deep water and I'd expect any excess material gets lost offshore. There is a small accidental beach tucked into the northwest side of the jetty a little farther east (bottom photo), but it doesn't show much evidence of continuing to accumulate sediment.

Here's another post from Port Gamble from a few years ago:
Teekalet: August 2014

Clam Bay

There are enough constructed beaches on Puget Sound, and Puget sound is large enough, so that it's easy to lose track of some of them. Including some of the nicest ones. Particularly when they're located a little off the track. This one, which I last visited in October 2010, is located in Manchester, pretty much in front of the Manchester Environmental Lab (EPA and Ecology). It is a secured area, so professional interest is tolerated, but a lunch stop with the kids would be frowned on.

AERIAL VIEW

The "Shore Protection System" (some might call it a gravel beach) was built in 1999-2000? as part of cleaning up and capping the old Navy dump site (nothing like a little lagoon behind a spit in which to dump stuff, then burn it for fire training exercises). The Corps is responsible for occasionally checking on how it's doing, but I don't know if there has been any tweaking of the original beach work. Frankly, it looks like it's doing just fine.

This is a really neat beach. It has a slightly engineered look, particularly the coarse gravel storm berm, but what a great alternative to the rock revetment that might have been built otherwise. Remind me someday to figure out how to draw more attention to these projects!

Manchester State Park

This is the second of three posts from Manchester in south Kitsap County. Each from a very different kind of beach! Here on Puget Sound, we don't go for that notion of miles and miles of unchanging beach - we'd rather keep people guessing.

AERIAL VIEW

The State Park is located just inside the mouth of Rich Passage. It's located near the trace(s) of the east-west Seattle Fault and the upland consists of the terrace raised by movement on the fault. The shore here is basically a small pocket beach, fed by erosion of the low terrace on both sides. The erosion on the west side had begun to threaten the roadway (now a path) and within the last few years an effort was made to protect the low scarp by using anchored logs backfilled by gravel.

It looks to me like there have been some problems - waves have scoured behind the root wads and the path is still vulnerable (just the edge, nothing's going away very fast). This is a tricky site - the wave energy isn't terribly high, but there's little protective beach on this obliquely-oriented, sediment-starved reach, so eroded sediment is rapidly swept farther into the cove.

Manchester

Pomeroy Park, in downtown Manchester (not to be confused with the grittier versions in England and New Hampshire), is a nice centerpiece to the small community's waterfront. Which contrasts nicely with the distant Seattle skyline.

AERIAL VIEW

I noted this site and the elevated boat ramp several years ago: Manchester: October 2010

Kitsap County recently completed an innovative stormwater project in town and the new outfall was integrated into the base of the pier. This is an interesting design and personally, I like the idea of allowing stormwater (relatively clean stormwater, at least) to run out across the beach much like a natural stream.

This does pose some coastal design issues, though, since the stream can erode sand and gravel on the upper beach and transport it to the lower beach. During heavy flows at low tide, this may result in a channel of sorts and this in turn can lead to localized erosion on adjacent banks. This has been addressed in part with a series of tiered logs backfilled with gravel. Fortunately, this type of erosion can be fairly ephemeral, and as long as there is adequate sediment on the beach, can recover quickly.

Traditionally, one approach to reducing erosion below an outfall would have been to construct an apron of angular rock across the beach. The irony is that this would have protected the beach from erosion by burying it under rock. I'm glad they didn't do that here - or at least if they did, it's below beach grade.

Salsbury Point

In the fall of 1995, Kitsap County Parks removed the old riprap and nourished the beach. And it's still doing remarkably well.

It's a difficult site - the lagoon was filled, the beach pushed out, and the coastal regime altered because of the boat ramps and because the floating bridge has cut off much of the southerly wave action (which would have continued to deliver sediment). The original plan was just to rebuild a nicer rock bulkhead, but a habitat biologist pushed back, suggesting something softer. And County Parks staff were willing to listen. A geologist with the state (much younger then) helped them sketch out some ideas and cross-sections, based on experience with some of Wolf Bauer's designs.

Beach east of the boat ramps

Although I was pretty confident the project would work, I never would have expected it to go 20 years without a little assistance. The underlying erosion problem remains and the beach has gradually retreated into the backshore created in 1995. The backshore is a little too high, so it doesn't get overtopped, and therefore supports upland vegetation better than beach grass. An old drain pipe has gradually been exposed and dribbles rusty water onto the beach.

Healthy beach at south end of park

Previous post:  Salsbury Point: 2013

I think some adaptive management is due. Before someone gets surprised and does something dumb. I understand there is talk of doing some work on the boat ramp(s) - maybe that will be a chance to look at some options.

AERIAL VIEW

Of course, there's still a difficult stretch between the main park and the ramp - I think it's where electric cables head out under the canal. It's oriented obliquely to the waves and has no sediment - which presents a real challenge.

Port Gamble

I posted about the old Port Gamble mill site a couple of years ago (Teekalet 2014) and since then much of that site has been cleaned up - although any significant redevelopment is still down the road.

This post is from the shoreline south of the point, along the western shore of the bay. This area is also getting cleaned up - it used to be piles, log rafts, and other timber industry relics, some of which remains.

This is a fairly protected shoreline of modest bluffs and small stream mouths. It's going to be a very pleasant shoreline to explore as the public access is improved and the remaining debris is removed, although I assume some of the old stuff will stay, either to provide some historic context or because it gets overlooked.

AERIAL VIEW

Maybe I'll come back in the kayak this summer.

Nellita Creek

It's getting harder and harder to imagine what this site looked like just six years ago - when 400' of timber bulkhead marked the shoreline and the channelized creek flowed over the bulkhead in a flume. The small estuary that was created behind the old bulkhead line is smaller than it started, since a lot of sediment came down the stream in the first couple of years, but it still represents new wetland, brackish marsh, and low gradient stream habitat. Salt marsh is establishing near the creek mouth and the forest is rapidly taking over the rest of the site.

AERIAL VIEW

The beach still seems to be naturally starved of sediment to me, and the restored spit has a strange appearance (look at the aerial), but all the pieces are in place and with time they will sort themselves into something that looks like it always belonged.

This is my fourth visit - you've got to go back to the 2009 post to see what it looked like before:

Nellita Creek: October 2011
Nellita: January 2010
S. of Frenchman's Cove: May 2009

By the way, this is part of the Stavis NRCA (WDNR's Natural Resource Conservation Area), since I realized I had never used that name in these posts. I'm still not even sure that Nellita Creek is really the correct name - or if it is, that I've spelled it right!

Point No Point

Point No Point is an important landmark - the southernmost of three prominent points that mark the western entrance into Admiralty Inlet and Puget Sound. Point Wilson in Port Townsend. Marrowstone Point. And Point No Point. Each has a small lighthouse. Each is a cuspate foreland.

AERIAL VIEW

Cuspate forelands are triangular landforms that typically form where wave action approaches from two different directions. Longshore transport moves sediment toward the point from each direction, resulting in an accumulation of material and the growth of the feature. Sand and gravel may accrete on one limb or the other of the landform, or may be lost off the tip into deep water.

The old t-sheets show a tidal inlet on the north side, serving a large wetland behind the beach homes along Point No Point and Norwegian Point (which is basically a western continuation of the same barrier beach). The wetland is now broken up by development and drainage systems and the open tidal channel to the north has been replaced by a pipe and tide gate on the east.

On this visit, there was a distinct scarp high on the beach where recent wave action had dropped the sandy beachface half a foot or so.

The Point offers great views of Puget Sound to both north and south. Mount Rainier and the high rises of Seattle are visible to the south. Mount Baker rises over Whidbey Island to the northeast.

North Kitsap

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to see some of northern Kitsap County from the water. I took plenty of photos on our trip from Indianola north to Foulweather Bluff, but have had trouble figuring out what was interesting enough to post. The real problem is that I prefer to base my entries on a single location and boat trips tend to generate scattered pictures from many different places.

So I'll post a few from some different spots with brief captions. I did something like this from a similar trip several years ago. Kitsap Bluffs: April 2009.

High bluffs in Indianola

Doe Kag Wats - there's a big salt marsh behind that beach

House perched on glacial till at Point Jefferson

Typical bluff top development near President Point

We only saw one beach construction project all day - and it was this

rock revetment being taken out!

Unstable slopes immediately north of Kingston. The shoreline from here north
for several miles is marked by deep-seated landslides

More deep-seated slides - and a nice stretch of natural beach. In the late 1990s,
much of this stretch was geologically active and several development projects failed

The northeast end of Foulweather Bluff, where sliding appears to be occurring
adjacent to some recent development. Note scarps above the bluff right of center.

Barker Creek

Two years ago, Kitsap County pulled out the old bulkhead at Anna Smith Park on Dyes Inlet (October 2012). This year, a bulkhead was pulled out on private property a short distance away and it's already hard to imagine that there was a structure here at all.

Yes, erosion will occur - as matter of fact, that is part of the point. But erosion is awfully slow and poses no risk to the upland development - and will not for many, many decades (longer than that, actually). There is still a way for residents to get to their beach and there is actually more beach for them to get to. The slope has been planted and will quickly blend in with natural shorelines in the vicinity.

It's amazing to see the progress being made by local groups in pulling out unneeded structures and in restoring beaches and shorelines. These will be the core of a growing menu of examples that help convince a lot of reluctant property owners that a natural shoreline can also be a desirable one. It's not the answer everywhere, but Puget Sound is an enormous place (2500 miles of shoreline) and there is plenty of room for both urban development and natural shorelines. But it would be nice if we could maintain or restore more of the natural in these rural and suburban areas.

The spit at the mouth of Barker Creek

Tracyton Beach Road

The Seattle Fault runs east-west across the Sound, leaving it's trace along the shoreline from Alki Point to Rich Passage to the north side of Bremerton. The most obvious evidence is exposures of Tertiary bedrock along the shore in the narrow band of uplift associated with the fault.  Raised beaches and stranded shorelines also occur in these areas, indicative of geologically recent uplift.

AERIAL VIEW

These rocky exposures appear on the shorelines at the south end of Dyes Inlet. Here, along Tracyton Beach Road, at the northwestern end of Port Washington Narrows, the bedrock appears where the road runs along the water and is easy to access. I believe this is all Oligocene Blakely Sandstone or variations on that basic theme. The bedrock rapidly vanishes a short distance north or south.

For the most part, bedrock (anything pre-Pleistocene) is thousands of feet below Puget Sound until you get up to Rocky Point and Deception Pass on Whidbey Island, to locations near Port Hadlock and southern Marrowstone Island, and of course, along the uplift of the Seattle Fault.  Bedrock is also widespread farther north (San Juans and Chuckanut) and along the western Strait of Juan de Fuca.