English Bay

Some pictures of First Beach on English Bay in Vancouver from a gray day a couple of weeks ago. I've posted many times from here before (Gravel Beach: English Bay) and don't have anything much to add this time.

But it's a favorite spot, no matter what the weather, and it seemed a nice way to close out 2019.

AERIAL VIEW

First Beach

First Beach, which is also simply called English Bay Beach, is the largest of the sculpted beaches along Vancouver's English Bay. As with all these beaches, it faces directly into the largest waves, otherwise the beach would leak out at one end or the other.

AERIAL VIEW

Saturday afternoon is pretty much just a sunny day at the beach and the tide rising over the low tide terrace is warm enough to swim in - and many folks do. By late afternoon, the crowds thicken. I do my best to estimate where the water level will be when the fireworks start, so we can be in the right place at 10PM, and the other several hundred thousand people are behind us, not in front of us.

By early Sunday morning, the beach is clean, empty, and groomed (for more on grooming, see English Bay: August 2006).

False Creek

Just a few shots of the edge of False Creek - a wonderful shoreline, albeit not quite the marshy estuary it once was. There's really not enough wave action to create beaches in here, even if the configuration and the profiles were more amenable, so the result is an interesting assortment of engineering treatments.

AERIAL VIEW

Here are some links back to some earlier False Creek posts:
Creekside: October 2011
Yaletown: October 2011
False Creek: August 2010

English Bay

I've posted many times about many different beaches on English Bay - I suppose they are my favorite urban beaches, we visit them regularly, and I always take too many pictures. Here are a few, from the last weekend in July.

Most of the photos are of Sunset Beach, on the north side of the inner portion of the bay. Including the little beach that peters out up against the Burrard Street Bridge and the entrance to False Creek.

The last photo is Hadden Park's Dog Beach, just across the water in Kitsilano. It also appears in Kitsilano: April 2016.

AERIAL VIEW

Gravel Beach: Vancouver (lots of beaches, lots of posts)

I'll follow up (I think) with some photos of First Beach, also on English Bay, and several non-beaches on False Creek.

Second Beach

Vancouver has many small pocket beaches that face westward out into the bay and I've probably posted from most of them by now (a few links below). Second Beach, in Stanley Park is yet another of these. Like the others, it has been enhanced by the construction of structures that help maintain the pocket and also probably by the addition of sediment at some point.

AERIAL VIEW

Second Beach lies just east of the big pool (frozen over on this trip) which looks as if it was probably constructed out over the foreshore. This improves the configuration of the shoreline for the beach itself. There's also a rock groin at the east end which keeps Second Beach from spilling around the corner and joining the much larger, but similarly aligned, First Beach (but which is usually called English Bay Beach).

English Bay: December 2014
Third Beach: April 2007
Sunset Beach: August 2016
Kitsilano: April 2016
Jericho Beach: August 2008
Ambleside: October 2011

The Stanley Park seawall west of the Second Beach pool

Stearman Beach

Much of West Vancouver's western shoreline has a bedrock foundation, with scattered beaches where favored by shoreline configuration and stream mouths. Stearman Beach is at one of these stream mouths. It and other nearby streams (Cypress Creek, just east, is considerably larger) have built small deltas and a broad gravelly foreshore, which provides sediment and elevation for the beaches (albeit small and irregular beaches).

AERIAL VIEW

The homes that look out over Stearman Beach are relatively modest, at least compared to many of the others along West Vancouver's shoreline. The ones here all have glass railings - providing for views while discouraging the curious from clambering over their seawalls.

Dundarave

I posted from here back in October 2011 and then again just this past year, in April 2016. I like the broad western view out into the Strait of Georgia, always dotted with large ships waiting to pick up Canadian stuff to take to Asia (or at least I think that's what they're doing) and the east view back towards Vancouver and Stanley Park.

AERIAL VIEW

But mainly I like the two contrasting beaches on each side of the jetty. The simple gravel pocket beach built up against the west side and the wonderful little sand-on-the-steps beach on the lee side.

Sunset Beach

Sunset Beach is actually several beaches, held in place against three large rock groins just west of the Burrard Bridge on the north side of the entrance of False Creek. The inner shorelines of English Bay are oblique to the dominant wave action, which arrives from the west (roughly), so beaches don't stay put unless there's a natural promontory or an artificial structure of some sort for them to pile up against.

AERIAL VIEW

Looking at English Bay from the air is useful, since it shows the westward orientation of the beaches not just on Sunset Beach, but also the larger beach farther west on English Bay (December 2014) and the beaches in Kitsilano (May 2016) on the south side of the bay.

This last photo shows the seawall and path just west of Sunset Beach - I guess it illustrates the challenge of creating and maintaining beaches where the orientation is wrong (especially where there is also no sediment).

Kitsilano Beach

Most of Vancouver's shorelines are oriented obliquely to the large western fetch across Georgia Strait, which means that beaches (natural or constructed) tend to do best when the orientation of shoreline allows west-facing swash aligned beaches to form. This is best seen by looking at aerial views of West Vancouver, Third Beach in Stanley Park, English Bay, and Kitsilano.

AERIAL VIEW

The main beach at Kitsilano, on the south side of English Bay, is controlled by a bouldery headland that makes the swash-aligned beach possible. I suspect sediment has been added periodically to maintain the broad recreational beach, but other than a couple of small rock groins, this beach doesn't depend on larger groins like we've seen at Ambleside or on the north shore of English Bay.

There's a second beach at Kitsilano, just around the corner northeast of the main beach. But it appears to have been created by the construction of a rock jetty at the entrance to False Creek (see aerial). It's oriented a little differently than the main beach, suggesting (to me, at least) that waves may refract around the headland between the beaches and approach this one at a slightly sharper angle.

I've always been intrigued by these rippled patterns on Salish Sea beaches. They're often pretty subtle, but they raise questions about their formation. These are not the same as ripples you might see in other types of beach environments. They typically form perpendicular to the beach and may extend through a significant tidal range. They tend to have wavelengths of 30-60 cms, but sometimes more. It seems like they would have to form on a falling tide to be preserved. But once the pattern is established at high tide, it is propagated down the beach as the tide falls. They may be somehow related to larger scale horns and cusps on other beaches, where the emergent bedform influences subsequent swash patterns, further reinforcing the original undulations. If that makes any sense at all! This phenomenon is probably well documented by others, but I've never seen it described. There is an abundant literature on cusps (still controversial) and on ripples, but I think this is something a little different. Or maybe in between.

Point Grey Foreshore - Part Four

Okay, one more post from this short stretch of beach. The seawall immediately west of Volunteer Park is very new and has gotten a lot of attention, in part because it is so unique and so visible.

As sculpture, or architecture, I thought it was pretty cool. If seawalls are going to get built, it would be nice to see them designed to be beautiful as well as functional. So many are ugly or boring or uninspired or cookie cutter. Sort of like strip malls and eastern-bloc apartment buildings. This is different.

The seawall is constructed from Corten (COR-TEN) Steel, an alloy intended to oxidize rapidly, creating a rust coating that doesn't require painting. It's been around for a long time and has become a favorite of some architects and artists who like its raw look and functionality. 

For more on this seawall, including about its designers and builders, check out:
ShapedScape 2014
Houzz: Metamorphous

When this was first brought to my attention earlier this year, one of the claims was that it would naturally degrade over time. I understood this to mean that it was really just a temporary structure - which is sort of a neat idea with seawalls, as long as they don't just get replaced by something else later on. Given that the recommendations for Corten Steel suggest not using it near saltwater (because it will corrode even faster), I guess this adds weight to the argument that this is a "temporary" installation. But what happens as it breaks down over a few decades? Does the steel begin to develop ragged holes as the rust stains gradually spread down the beach? Or is the whole process completely benign?

For the time being, the wall is sufficiently far back that only the highest tides will reach it. But if this shoreline is eroding - and we must assume that it is - there will be less and less beach in front of the wall over time. The boulders placed on the beach (we saw this approach used in West Vancouver a few posts back) may trap some sediment, but they don't really change the underlying processes of rising sea level and chronic erosion.

Point Grey Foreshore - Part Three

While the foreshore is natural, the terrestrial edge is definitely not. This shoreline is almost entirely walled off. The walls reduce erosion, but probably their greatest benefit to the residences above is that they allow the terraces and patios to be extended right to the bluff edge, something the ragged natural edge would make difficult. Many of the walls had glass railings bolted to their top edge. The walls also discourage invasive brambles and human trespassers.  

Seawalls are often very mundane, utilitarian structures -- unpainted concrete, rock, or timber surfaces that are rarely seen by the people who live above them. But seawalls, particularly high walls like these, are great surfaces for artistic expression, and while this does nothing to address the environmental impacts, it sure makes the walls more interesting to folks on the beach.