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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.
Ediz Hook is the long spit that extends east into the Strait of Juan de Fuca to create Port Angeles Harbor. It's always a neat contrast to Dungeness Spit, a little farther east. I've posted from here before (October 2009, and perhaps other times as well), but thought that this view from the Victoria-bound MV Coho a few weeks ago offered a neat perspective on the distal tip of the spit.
AERIAL VIEW
The outer side of the spit has been heavily armored over the decades and this leads to some interesting messiness as the riprap runs out at the east end of the airstrip.
I'm trying to get back on schedule going into 2020, so the next few posts may be pretty brief (which is probably a good thing anyway).
This beach on the northwest side of Whidbey Island, just outside of Deception Pass, isn't quite on the open ocean, but it still made a good Pacific Coast terminus to my trek across North America. The adventure didn't include too many beaches, but there were some, and I've tried to capture those in the previous posts.
West Beach, because it faces the exposed Strait of Juan de Fuca, displays more of the characteristics of higher energy beaches - including the development of offshore bars - than most beaches on the Salish Sea. It's also a fairly robust barrier, with beach ridges and dunes and a back barrier lagoon (Cranberry Lake: March 2007).
The smaller beaches below the bridge that face on Deception Pass itself are very different and a little hard to figure out (Deception Pass: May 2016). They look much more like pocket beaches, although the orientation is tough to characterize and I doubt they're closed to sediment transport - either in or out.
Presumably, my bike will be less of a feature in my subsequent posts. It was sort of hard to avoid in this recent batch since it was a critical part of my visits. Anyone who's interested in more of the backstory to the bike trip can check: Biketrip2019: Backroads and Bikepaths.
This was pretty much the best possible place (and conditions) to end a field trip on my last day in the field as a professional! The concrete artwork was colorful in the sunshine. The beach provided a great contrast to the three other beaches we'd already visited earlier in the day (Custom Plywood, Bowman Bay, and Cornet Bay). And after a fairly minimalist geologic overview, the participants went back to throwing stones and climbing on the logs until we all had to run off to catch our ferries.
West Beach: February 2013
While the fulcrum of my work-life balance is about to shift dramatically, I plan to continue Gravel Beach. This year has been a slow one on the blog and that may not pick up right away - it has been a distracting few months and my summer and fall will likely be in the mountains and the Interior (not so many beaches). And finally, I have big issues with the platform: Blogger is not very mobile-friendly. The blog takes a lot of time (at least when I'm posting much). And Google has put virtually nothing into supporting it for years. I'll keep playing around with other sharing options - some of which are linked over on the right (desktop version) - and will certainly let folks know if I decide to make big changes.
Seattle has been replacing its downtown seawall over the past couple of years. The new one provides better habitat - better, at least, than did the old seawall. But probably not quite the mixed sand and gravel beach, drift logs, and forested bluff that once stretched continuously from Smith Cove to the little point of land at the mouth of the Duwamish River that is now Pioneer Square.
The new seawall includes a low-tide bench, textured panels, and a cantilevered walkway with glass block to allow more light to reach the water. And here, just south of Colman Dock (the ferry dock is getting rebuilt, too), a beach is being added. But unlike the Sculpture Park farther north, where a pocket beach was carved into the old filled shoreline, here the beach is being perched between rock sills on a constructed platform that juts out into deeper water. This is a very strange beach.
One of the big benefits of beaches in urban settings is that they allow people to get to the water, but I've heard a rumor that this may not be possible here.
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 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.
If you're going to build a town on the water, it makes sense to find a piece of ground that's low enough to allow easy access to the town pier, yet high enough so the town doesn't flood every December. You want to pick a shoreline sheltered from the prevailing winds on a relatively protected bay.
Building over the water made sense in a 19th-century maritime community and the high bank lead to buildings that sort of spill over the bluff -- people and wagons approached on the upper floors, boats pulled up below. Stairs and hoists and gangways connected the two. Early Seattle - along the central waterfront - developed similarly. As did many towns in many other parts of the world.
In many places - Langley, Seattle - development eventually led to foundations being built to replace the piles or to the beach being filled behind a community seawall of some sort. Some of this happened here in Coupeville, too, but in some spots the beach remains, between and beneath the buildings.
The low shoreline of Mutiny Bay once consisted of a complex series of wetlands, tidal inlets, and northerly-directed sand spits. But these low areas also lend themselves to development. Wetlands were diked and plumbed and tide-gated. Inlets were filled in. And small fishing resorts, and later residential beach communities, were built on the spits. But the whole place is still little more than a big bunch of shifting sand bars. And there is a lot of sand in this system, particularly compared to many other beaches on Puget Sound.
There is a boat ramp at the end of Robinson Road (Mutiny Bay: February 2010), but like some other ill-fated boat ramps on South Whidbey (Maxwelton: July 2016), the ramp is regularly, and increasingly, buried by the accreting beach. Clearing it has turned from minor maintenance to a major earthmoving operation. And that practice may have other affects on the beach - and even if it doesn't, nearby changes are quickly attributed to the most obvious culprit, which is the county guy in the backhoe. It's harder for people to see the bigger picture, which is a complex system undergoing big changes over relatively long periods of time.
There are other complications, too. There's an outfall (which substitutes for the historic tidal inlet) right next to the ramp that at times is completely buried, but at others flows vigorously, rearranging the beach in the same location as the boat ramp. And then half a mile downdrift (north), there's an old pier that may have continuing effects on the beach both up and down drift.
This would make a great example of the problems with building on sand spits, except for the fact that there are other even better examples nearby. Sunlight Beach comes to mind, but so do Maxwelton, Columbia Beach, and Bell's Beach!
A series of photos illustrating the role of overwash in shaping barrier beaches is a standard element in many of my beach talks and one of my favorite examples is Perego's Lagoon on the west side of Whidbey Island. This Saturday I was up on Whidbey (at Sound Waters) and just before my presentation, someone mentioned that waves had recently breached that spit.
So I skipped out on the third session of the day and drove up to Ebey's Landing to check it out. Sure enough, there was a small breach in the berm crest near the south end and a fresh deposit of sand, gravel, and logs in the lagoon. This looks pretty small compared to some of the older, preserved ones nearby, but still very neat to visit before it patches itself back together (which it will probably do pretty quickly).
AERIAL VIEW
Although I don't know for sure, this likely occurred on December 20th, when a strong wind storm coincided with a high tide and a strong surge. There have been reports, and numerous videos, showing the fierceness of that storm, particularly in northern Puget Sound (Birch Bay got hit really bad).
Here are some previous posts from Perego's, some of which show the earlier overwash fans quite a bit better:
Gravel Beach: Perego's Lagoon
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.
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
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.
