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.

Marine View Drive

The Dick Gilmur Shoreline Access point is located along Marine View Drive on the north side of Commencement Bay, on the way out towards Browns Point. It's a relatively recent soft shore project intended to restore a more natural beach while also allowing for a small parking area and kayak launch.

AERIAL VIEW

One of the questions that keeps coming up for me is how to catalog and disseminate information about the large number of soft shore and beach restoration projects going on around Puget Sound. Overall, it's a remarkably positive story that needs to be told. It would provide people with design ideas and inspiration to do more projects and to do them better. It might provide an inventory from which people could choose sites for monitoring, for documentation, or simply for visiting.

But this has proven difficult. The number of projects is large, but they vary enormously and there is much disagreement about what types of projects should be included and how to assess performance. Many are poorly known and poorly documented. There is sensitivity among funders and landowners and contractors about possible problems and this makes it difficult to discuss the less successful projects (or more commonly, successful projects with unsuccessful elements), even if those are the ones we would all learn the most from.

Burfoot Park

Having finally caught up on our early summer Scandinavian trip, I find I've got a backlog of more local beaches from July. I'm going to try to crank out several short posts and see if I can catch up before heading off for B.C. this weekend.

This is a nice example of how easy it is to bury a beach under fill - and hints at how easy it might be to restore some beaches. It also underscores the point that on a lot of sites, it's the fill as much as the armor that is the problem. We focus on removing armor, or softening it, but ignore the culprit, which is that we buried the beach to create a lawn or a parking lot. Sometimes those things are necessary; sometimes they are not. But if you don't need the fill, you often don't need the armor.

AERIAL VIEW

Here, I suspect the existing beach access (a road down the bluff that doesn't show well in the photos) could be maintained with a very small landing, a ramp, and maybe some steps.

Weaverling Spit

The new beach at Weaverling Spit has progressed in three phases, the most recent of which was completed this past fall.

AERIAL VIEW

Each phase was designed a bit differently, reflecting slightly different site conditions, objectives, and perhaps lessons along the way. Of course, I suspect budgets and permit requirements were slightly different on each phase, too. All three involved beach nourishment, combined with planting of the bank/backshore and the use of anchored logs as small sills or groins.

Phase 1, farthest west, is 9(?) years old now and looks great.

Phase 2, in the middle, was done a few years later. The nature of the anchored log sills was different - the root masses were oriented differently and they were placed fairly high compared to the adjacent beach grade.

Phase 3 is still fresh and I assume plantings are planned. The folks who rent out those RV spots probably don't want trees and thick brush, but there are a lot of good options. The berm is much larger, although I suspect this is a function of the backshore being lower here than on the earlier phases.

Note the log placed perpendicular to the beach immediately west of the boat ramp at the easternmost end of the project. I assume this was to limit the movement of the added sediment onto the ramp - which might be expected since the new nourished beach is slightly higher (and there's a slight tendency for eastward drift of material along here anyway). I'll be curious to see how well this works.

There's more on this project at:
CGS: Weaverling Spit

And here's a link to all of my posts from here:
Gravel Beach: Weaverling Spit

Hidden Beach

Hidden Beach is hard to find. It's tucked in at the base of a high bluff along Saratoga Passage, at the bottom of a steep road that most folks on the main road don't even know exists. Even when you get to it, the beach is still sort of hard to find. It's buried beneath rocks and fill and old concrete and the occasional auto part. A row of piles out on the beach testifies to the original intentions, but this stretch at the north end was never developed, or if it was, little is left of it now. 

AERIAL VIEW

Years (decades) ago, I came down here and walked north to check out the wonderful high fluted till bluffs and some large glacial boulders just offshore. I don't think I've been back since, although I often look across at this shoreline from Cama Beach (on Camano Island), just across the water. 

The Hidden Beach community to the south is a great example of a type of development that is pretty common on Whidbey Island (elsewhere, too). Or was - most of the initial earthwork occurred in the 1950s and 1960s - you could never fill on top of the shoreline like this today.

Here's what it looks like on Ecology's Coastal Atlas: Aerial Photos

I've heard different versions of how these places were built, but basically the developer built a seawall out on the beach and then filled behind the bulkhead, burying the beach and creating building lots where logs once floated and fish once swam. They added just enough fill to raise the building sites above (most of) the highest tides. The fill material typically came from the bluff itself. Sometimes they used equipment, sometimes they used hoses, and sometimes they used dynamite.

The result was small, isolated beach communities that were wonderful escapes in the summer but that were squeezed beneath landslides from above and storm waves from the Sound in the winter. And an access road that would become impassable just when folks most needed to get out.

Waterman

A year and half ago, a 400' creosote timber bulkhead was removed from this beach (Waterman: May 2016). Restoration projects are always difficult and complex, but this one was conceptually pretty simple. Remove the old bulkhead and let nature take over. Which it (she?) is. Erosion, slides, falling trees. Fresh sand on the beach. You can still tell that something was done, but in a couple of years this shoreline will look like much as it did 500 years ago (some of my friends among the forest elves may disagree). The active slope will always make the trail a little muddy and challenging (it's currently closed), but with a little ongoing upkeep, it seems like folks should be able to get down and enjoy the beach (Waterman Preserve).

AERIAL VIEW

I'm sure I've noted before how difficult it is to describe the typical Puget Sound beach - what makes them all so special is that they are all so different. But a sand and gravel beach at the base of an eroding bluff, drift logs caught up among the fallen trees, eelgrass draped from the overhanging branches, truly gigantic pieces of wood, and occasional glimpses of human history - that's pretty much it. Of course, there's also early morning sunshine, views across the water of snow-capped volcanoes, and recognition that while humans are amazing builders, they also have the amazing capacity to see the value in unbuilding things now and then.

Sculpture Park

Some beaches change all the time. Or at least you can be pretty sure that if you haven't been there in while, it will be different when you come back. This beach isn't one of those. It has few degrees of freedom - admittedly, that was a key point of its design. It's the beach equivalent of putting a wide-ranging predator in a small enclosure in an old-fashioned zoo. Not very authentic, but much easier to manage.

AERIAL VIEW

The sediment is all nicely sorted gravel. Which means the beachface remains the same in both shape and texture. The coarse gravel also tends to stay high on the beach - it has less tendency to want to get lost offshore (ignoring stone-throwing children). The two rock groins assure that no material escapes and therefore the beach volume and position don't change. The groins also constrain the small opening of the beach to Elliott Bay which assures that the wave regime is limited and the beach can't shift back and forth too much in its cage.

I love this little beach and wish we could incorporate beaches into our urban shorelines more often. But I also think it is a good reminder that we shouldn't confuse domesticated beaches for wild ones. On the surface, they may look similar, but the domestic ones are more predictable and as a result, may have a little less character.

Oak Harbor

The low area that connects most of Oak Harbor to Forbes and Maylor Points may have begun as a tombolo - with a low beach connecting the higher ground at both ends. I don't know what its pre-war history, but during World War II the Navy filled much of this area to create a large seaplane base out of which they flew PBY Catalinas.

AERIAL VIEW

Oak Harbor's shoreline configuration seems like it lends itself to beaches (heck, that's what used to be here). There are already some nice ones on the west side of town. Maybe there are also some opportunities here at the east end to enhance beaches in front of the riprap (or replace the riprap with beaches), including this section around the marina. The wave energy is low, so the size of the sediment would be fairly small (so it can still move). I could picture a high tide beach much of the way from downtown around to Maylor Point, where the Navy has already done some beach restoration work in the last few years (a future visit, a future post). With any luck, other folks are already planning this!

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.

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.

Edgewater Beach

Before 2005, this was an out of the way spot where a lot of folks came to run their dogs on the beach. There was a dirt parking lot behind an eroding bank, and a small pocket beach tucked into the corner formed by the eastern end of the old tank farm.

Then the Port of Everett built the Mount Baker Terminal, primarily to move large airplane parts up the hill to Boeing's plant at Paine Field. Mitigation for the pier included improvements to the beach, but until the last year or so it was still sort of hard to get down here. Now the park is open and there were dogs out running on the beach again.

AERIAL VIEW

There are really three parts to this beach. There is the western corner where the beach was before. The orientation doesn't really lend itself to stability and it tends to unravel (just as it did prior to the pier), causing erosion along its back edge and leaving a beach covered with smaller riprap and quarry spalls shed from the adjacent riprap. Sediment eroded from this beach ends up on the low tide terrace, with help from the streams under the pier.

The middle part of the beach is largely under the pier and isn't really a beach, but is actually the delta of the two creeks that emerge from pipes under the base of the pier. The creeks drain two gullies that lead down the hill above the tank farm. The creeks are very effective at redistributing beach sediment from the upper beach down to the low tide terrace, where it's hard to get it back. This appears to be the sink for some of the sediment added on both sides of the pier ten years ago.

The beach farther east stretches out for 1000' along the railroad grade and has done well. It's probably eroded back a little, but there's a nice berm, plenty of logs, and a heavily vegetated backshore where once there was just a towering seawall and no beach at high tide. 

Much of the sediment lost from this beach has simply spread out farther along the train tracks, which is exactly what was hoped for in the first place.

This was an expensive project and we may need some cheaper approaches, but it's an important demonstration of how we might eventually restore a lot more of the Great Northern Beach between Golden Gardens and Everett.