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.

Mission Creek

Mission Creek is another small stream mouth with a long history. The old road cut across the mouth of the estuary on a small causeway but in the last couple of years, local groups have worked together to remove the armor and the fill and the creek now flows freely.

AERIAL VIEW

This site is at the south end of Olympia's Priest Point Park and within sight of the Capitol Building and the city's Port Peninsula. There's not much wave energy here on Budd Inlet. The shoreline in the park north of this site consists of a small promontory of Pleistocene gravel that would probably be long gone if the waves were bigger and a salt marsh that has formed without the need for a protective spit.

One the challenges of restoring these small stream mouths - besides the occasional railroad (see previous post) - is their cultural history. These places were probably always important Native American sites. They were low-lying areas with fresh water and easy access to the Sound. And later they were the obvious places for settlers to homestead or to build fishing camps and shingle mills. That means that although restoration may sound good to everyone, it is very difficult to do it without disturbing something of importance to someone.

Nisqually Reach

We took the class back to Tolmie this year. It's a good beach walk - especially on a nice June day. Bluffs, bulkheads, and a nice little barrier estuary. And some weird geology.

Two years ago (Butterball Cove), I was intrigued by the presence of a resistant geologic unit right below the surface of the beach. This year, the beach is lower, and this band of rock was much better exposed. I'm not sure what is most intriguing, the ledge, or the fact that the beach has fallen several inches. Between the geology of the site and the amount of bulkheading in the vicinity, its not like there's very much new sediment available to replace what gets lost.

Frye Cove

I walked in from the gate, since the park was still a couple of hours from opening. An early morning walk on the beach was partial compensation for the third all-day meeting in Olympia in as many days.

The beaches at the park are pretty silty - reflecting an abundance of fine sediment from unstable bluffs to the north and the lack of sufficient wave action to efficiently remove the fines from the coarser beach material.

The bluffs are heavily forested right down to the water, and though most of the big trees were probably taken out 130 years ago, there were still several large firs along the shore. The head of Frye Cove is a small estuary - with a muddy spit sheltering it from the rest of Eld Inlet.

The park recently installed a "soft" structure of cobble and anchored logs to deal with erosion at the park's primary beach access. I'm still a bit puzzled by these efforts - the intentions are good, but they seem a bit like a solution in search of a problem. What if you just excavated the bank back a little farther, planted the heck out of it, and built a simple low-impact wooden stairway. And left out all the cobble and the big stainless chains - which are neither native to this setting nor particularly "soft."

Nisqually Delta

The Nisqually Delta might have become a deep-water industrial port had it not been for a groundswell of environmental concern in the 1970s. But the lack of industry does not mean that the delta is okay. Deltas are about rivers spreading their sediment across a broad landscape and about the formation of a complex estuarine system. But then we dike them to create pasture for our cows and to prevent flooding of our valuable farmland (valuable because of the past flooding and the sediments it brought). And then hunters and birders discovered the joys of freshwater waterfowl - and easy access to the wetlands along the tops of the dikes.

At Nisqually, the dikes will be removed soon and tidal processes restored to 750 acres of wetland that still retain some of the 19th century tidal channels. Removal of the dikes means loss of the loop trail - although new paths will still allow access to the restored delta. New dikes will maintain some freshwater areas -- and protect the Refuge headquarters from rising sea level? (I put some additional pictures at hshipman.blogspot.com).

One of the interesting questions that came up recently was the history or purpose of the bench that lies along the saltwater side of much of the main dike - is this an earlier dike or a feature built to allow construction of the dike or a protective berm to protect the main dike from erosion? It represents lots of work, and lots of dirt, and will need to be removed in addition to the main dike to assure that natural drainage is restored to the delta.

North Point

The Port of Olympia sits on a promontory of fill at the southern end of Budd Inlet, at the mouth of the Deschutes River. Its northern shoreline faces up the inlet and wave action is primarily from that direction. Not surprisingly, the artificially imposed shoreline erodes if not protected or otherwise managed. They've done a nice job of cleaning up and redeveloping this area and this shoreline is an improvement over the industrial mess of a few years ago, but it looks like maybe they still have some problems to work out.

I suspect the intentions were good. Maintain a softer shoreline and avoid simply riprapping the eroding bank (the way it would have been dealt with 60, or even 10, years ago). The problem is that there's nothing to prevent ongoing erosion of the gravelly beach face and it is going to gradually retreat and undercut the large line of boulders. A couple have already begun their march down the beach. I suspect that in order to maintain a soft shoreline here, it may be necessary to add some more gravel and some sort of sill at the west end (maybe under the restaurant?) to keep the gravel from getting away.

Priest Point Park, just up the inlet from here, is a nice leftover piece of original South Sound shoreline.

Deschutes Estuary

I probably should have titled this post "Capitol Lake," just to avoid controversy, but after all, it is the mouth of the Deschutes River and it would be an estuary were it not for the inconvenience of a small dam under 5th Avenue. I'm not sure it's fair to call this a beach since there isn't enough wave energy to move the gravel around very much. I suppose it would look a little different if the 15' tide was restored to this placid little reflecting pond.

Jubilee Beach

A private beach where dynamite was once manufactured and loaded on ships. The pier is about all that remains of the old Atlas plant. Now this site is part of the huge new subdivisions crawling out of Lacey. At least here, the houses will be kept way back from the bluff and the beach will remain a wild one.

This is a pretty sandy beach, though in many places covered with a veneer of gravel. There were barnacles growing on the top side of 2" pebbles, suggesting that it has been few years since there has been a north storm big enough to roll them around (this is a north-facing shoreline, so the more common southerlies have little impact). There was a wide, sloping terrace. I am always impressed by the height and width of south sound beaches - a result of the much higher tidal range down here than farther north.

There is an abandoned boat just southeast off of Beachcrest. There was an wrecked car at the bottom of the bluff - I suspect someone pushed (drove?) it over the edge many years ago. And even a recently abandoned bicycle. And then there's the old pier. So it's not completely wild - but it was close.

Butterball Cove

I arrived near this same spot last June, from the other direction. The shoreline that extends northwest from the mouth of the Nisqually crosses a series of small drainages. They originally formed when sea level was lower and have subsequently been flooded, resulting in a series of drowned valley estuaries. Spits have formed across most of their mouths, creating what I call barrier estuaries, but which belong to a more general class of features on Puget Sound most of us call "pocket estuaries." The name fits.

There are lots of these in southern Puget Sound. The sea level history is more conducive to them here than farther north. It rains more down here, so the drainage networks are more developed. And there has been less wave erosion to smooth out the coast and remove little divots like these. There are intertidal deltas at the mouths of each of these that are part stream delta, part ebb-tide delta. I suspect much of the wood scattered across the beach was flushed out during the December storm.

Nisqually Reach

Butterball Cove

I hadn't walked the beach east from Tolmie State Park in over a decade, so I was a bit apprehensive about doing it with a class. As it turned out, it not only went well, but provided me an opportunity to revisit a site that I had wondered about for years.

In the mid-1990s, a brand new bulkhead was built at the base of the near-vertical bluff just west of Butterball Cove. Shortly afterwards, the bluff collapsed on top of the new wall. I've used a picture of that partially buried seawall for years to show the limitations of a narrow-minded focus on the bluff toe. It turns out that more failures have occurred since then and folks had to take my word that there was indeed a concrete seawall buried deep beneath the dirt and broken trees. The bluff itself has now been sprayed with gunnite (or shotcrete - are they the same?) and flowers neatly planted across the top. Someday, I suppose the bulkhead will be exhumed by waves - probably much to the surprise of the future owners of the property!

On very rare occasions on Puget Sound, we find Pleistocene sediments so resistant to erosion that they persist as headlands while the adjacent bluff recedes. This prow on the beach at Butterball Cove is one such example - the older iron-stained conglomerate is a natural bulkhead, extending out to a mid-tide. Interesting that on the beach to the west we saw what appeared to be this unit and possibly an underlying one outcropping in shore parallel bands on the beach. Again, not something we observe very often, since it probably requires resistant rock units, limited wave energy, and a minimal veneer of beach sediment.