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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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
Compared to the very recent pocket beaches in the previous post, this is an older beach trapped in a natural north-facing cove. I have no idea if the sand was brought in at some point, or has been replenished, or whether this beach just happened by itself.
Google Maps: AERIAL VIEW
On these small curved sites, I'm always intrigued by the mismatch between the shape of the built shoreline (in this case, the curved concrete steps) and the natural shape of the swash-aligned pocket beach. Sometimes there's no choice. Sometimes, I think planners sort of thought that if they built the wall in a particular orientation, the beach would naturally do the same thing (no one asked the waves). And sometimes, I just see it as an opportunity to enlarge the beach in the future.
This park is one of many places around Lake Washington where small beaches have been carved into the shoreline during the past decade. The idea is to restore a more natural shoreline and improve habitat for fish and wildlife. In general, these small beaches are also a big plus for recreational users - be they residents of lakefront property or visitors to public beaches.
Google Maps: AERIAL VIEW
Lake Washington was lowered in the early 1900s, stranding whatever beaches existed on the resulting raised terrace. These small pocket beaches aren't restoring exactly what was there before, but they're sure an improvement over the bulkheads and stone revetments that line so much of the rest of the lake.
At a relatively high tide, walking the beach at West Point below Discovery Park one might be struck by the relief - a steep gravel beach and a much higher and steeper bluff. But when the tide is 3' below Mean Lower Lowe Water and one walks out to the receding water's edge, the high bluff and the thin strip of gravel sort of fades in the distance.
Previous posts:
November 2009
February 2012
West Point: Coastal Care -- November 2011
AERIAL VIEW
These broad sand flats south of West Point are spectacular. Spring time low tides are often an excuse for bus loads of school children to decimate large populations of vulnerable fauna, but really, the best part of these midday spectacles is walking barefoot through sand and eelgrass on gently rolling sand bars. You feel you could almost walk across the Sound - as long as you ignore the fact that the water is almost 1000' deep between here and Bainbridge Island.
The south side of Discovery Park shares the same deep-seated landslide complex that characterizes most of the southwest shore of Magnolia - the difference here being that the slide is sort of doing what it always did, whereas elsewhere in Magnolia, great efforts have been taken to stabilize the slope enough to build homes on top of it.
But here in the Park, we get a glimpse of a big landslide in action. The slope is sliding on clay at, or slightly below beach level. This is a common scenario for these deep slides and the symptoms are often similar.
Previous Posts:
Discovery Park: February 2010
West Point: February 2012
The beach (way out onto the terrace) is a mosaic of subtle ridges of cobble and clay, likely artifacts of past movement on the slide as the coastline has retreated. Although there are some intact outcrops of clay on the beach, most show signs of uplift, tilting, internal deformation, and a general tendency towards soft and gooey.
The eroding bluff at the toe of the slide consists of sandier material and large wood that has been incorporated into the slide mass as it has gradually moved towards the beach.
Magnolia Bluff is both some of Seattle's premier real estate and one of Puget Sound's best known deep-seated landslide complexes. The homes along Perkins Lane are held in place with expensive public drain systems (some dating to the WPA in the 1930s) and at least in some cases, expensively engineered foundations and retaining walls. Occasionally, these things aren't enough and the homes don't stay put.
AERIAL VIEW
The views are spectacular, but the beaches leave something to be desired. There is very little sand and gravel - most of it where seawalls are sufficiently far back to allow a remnant of the original upper beach or where sediment has been trapped on the updrift, southeast side of old groins. Most of the beach is coarse gravel and cobble, too stable to get rolled around under most wave conditions. It is unlikely that this beach was so starved of finer beach sediment 100 years ago, since the eroding bluffs should have provided plenty of it. But today, it's really hard to figure out where that sediment would come from.
