Woodway

There's a beautiful little sandy beach where the shoreline returns to the railroad on the north side of Point Wells. Somehow a little pocket of forest got trapped between the asphalt plant and the railroad grade. A couple of small streams pass beneath the tracks, through the woods, then trickle out across the beach. These wonderful studies in alluvial geomorphology are pretty ephemeral - they won't survive the next high tide, but in the meantime, we get braided channels, incision, undercut stream banks, channel migration, and terrace formation.

Apparently, this beach, like the Evergreen beach in Olympia and Wreck Beach in Vancouver, is clothing optional (what did we do without the internet?). Which apparently entertains the folks passing by on Amtrak. But maybe just in warmer weather - the only other people I saw today were bundled up.

Point Wells

The weather was nice, so I continued my little Saturday afternoon walk north past Point Wells. The south side of the point is a big construction site, since I think this is where they are building the new sewer outfall from the Brightwater Plant in Woodinville. The north side is Chevron's asphalt plant - something it's been for a very long time.

Point Wells is a fairly large cuspate foreland that I suppose may have originally sheltered a marsh or lagoon. The tip, in the vicinity of the piers, seems strangely squared off. Maybe this is the way the landform was always shaped, or maybe it's some sort of response to the piers (or to dredging adjacent to the piers). The southern beach is swash-aligned and very broad. The berm and drift logs are backed by riprap and a big fence, but the beach itself is in remarkably nice shape. I wonder if some of the beach's stability results from the presence of a coarse-gravel bar or ridge out nearer the tip of the point, which appears to act like a low-tide groin? On the north side, the riprap encroaches on the beach and I doubt you could walk all the way around the point at anything greater than a mid-tide.

Someday Chevron will pack up and leave. And once the soils are cleaned up, something else will move in. Maybe it will be condos and a marina. But maybe it could be a regional park, maybe the biggest and best shoreline park between Seattle and Everett, adjacent to one of the most densely populated stretches of the urban corridor. It would be nice to pull back the riprap and the fill at the tip and on the north side, leaving a wide high tide beach all around. There's enough room for a mix of recreational uses and maybe even a little bit of restored wetland or forest. If they need to have condos and businesses, put them back at the base of the hill next to the parking lots. Oh, and then add the trail along the base of the bluff from here to Edmonds...

Richmond Beach

There are only a few places between Seattle and Everett where development has occurred waterward of the railroad tracks. This stretch of homes in Richmond Beach is one of them. It is also right up there with Skyline (Anacortes) and a few other select Puget Sound locations where the audacity of the residential development is particularly acute - it is not really typical of shoreline practices on the Sound, but it sure makes for great pictures of seawalls.

The origin of this chunk of land is interesting. It is not a small barrier or cuspate foreland, cut off from the mainland by the railroad. Neither is it all fill - created land on which homes have been built (althugh some of it may be). Rather, it appears to be a low promontory of glacial drift, probably till, that for whatever reasons, chose to project itself farther west than most of this shoreline. Of course, you can't see much of the original geology of this bluff, as it's pretty much plastered over by the concrete retaining walls that protect the homes from the consequences of their spectacular location.

Saltwater Park

Most people simply call this shoreline park Richmond Beach, but technically, I guess it is the City of Shoreline's Saltwater Park. Not to be confused with Saltwater State Park in Des Moines. But it does call atttention to the fact that there is more to the community of Richmond Beach than just the beach.

The beach is on a broad point of land that at first glance appears to be a barrier. It is a "constructional" landform and it may be okay to call it an accretion beach (Bauer did) or a barrier (I probably have), but it's actually the leftover pile of sand and gravel that built up around the pier below the big pit when this place was in full operation early in the century. The upland part of the park, which is currently being renovated, is a big bowl that began as the gravel (sand?) mine...sort of like the big divots on the southeast shore of Maury Island or north of Chamber's Creek. The best analog might be Sunnyside Beach in Steilacoom, where a park has been built on an artificial promontory with similar origins.

The landform is highly assymetric with a broad sweeping beach on the southern shore and then an abrupt northern end (see map linked to title of this post), marked by a cobble lag (as often is the case, the cobble masks an underlying substrate that is much sandier). Besides the sand/gravel operation, this site has been shaped by the railroad, which first arrived here in the early 1890s, and cuts through the park. Like many other parks along this "Great Northern" shoreline (Picnic Point, Carkeek, Howarth, etc) you reach the beach on a pedestrian overpass over the tracks.

Kayak Point

Another post from that really cold early morning in mid-December. Kayak Point, like Lowell Point, Cama Beach, Breezy Point, Onamac Point, and several others, is some blend of a recurved spit, cuspate foreland, or, the term I prefer, looped barrier. The beach diverges from the coastline at the barrier's updrift end (always the south, in these examples) and then reconnects with the coastline a mile or so north, gradually merging back with the bluff. They inevitably had some sort of lagoon behind them. At some sites there may have been a tidal inlet. At Kayak Point, the remains of the old ebb tide delta are still visible on the lower beach north of the pier.

The bluffs to the south were dripping with icicles. There are some nice lakebed clays in these bluffs and the chunks that occasionally fall onto the beach in big piles display nice varves (laminations), marking the passing of individual years at the bottom of the big lake before the great glacier arrived from the north. Or at least I think that's the correct order of events.

From a warmer day, back in 2007: Kayak Point

Lowell Point

December was crazy and this was one of two posts from mid-month that got lost somewhere before the holidays and Las Vegas. The predictions were for some of the highest tides of the year around daybreak, so I headed way before dawn to Camano and Port Susan for a brisk and quick - very brisk, very quick - morning trip. As is often the case on these relatively calm, cold mornings, the tide is restrained by the high pressure, so my hope to see the water washing the drift logs off the beach failed to materialize. But what a beautiful morning.

Lowell Point is the low barrier beach at Camano Island State Park (click on title of post to go to Google Maps). A high bluff to the south supplies gravel to beaches from here all the way to Utsalady (including Cama Beach). The waves had tossed up a nice little gravel ridge, marking the morning's high tide. The stormier tides from earlier in the weekend had been higher. The lagoon - or what's left of it - was flooded and frozen. There are differing opinions on whether Lowell Point was an open tidal lagoon before the 1900s - if there was an inlet, it would have probably been down near the boat ramp at the north end.

Overton Beach

Overton Beach is a boat launch way up on the north arm of Lake Mead. At Boulder Beach, the waves were able to build small beaches, but not erode the shoreline itself. Here, the shoreline is steeper and the lake has cut a series of subtle strandlines and one not so subtle scarp. I suppose the height of the bluff reflects both the length of time that the lake remained at that particular level, the magnitude of storms that occurred during that period, and the steepness and erodibility of the shoreline itself. Here, the shoreline is on a pair of projecting ridges that appear to have been built as breakwaters when the marina was created, so they consist of nothing but loose gravel.

Boulder Beach

My challenge during a long weekend in Las Vegas (more pictures at hshipman) with lots of extra time on my hands was to find some beaches. Of course, that usually begins with locating water bodies, which around here narrows the search awfully quickly. The first candidate was at the Mandalay Bay, where the pool offered hope of artificial waves and a simulated beach. But it was closed for the season and the photo over the fence isn't worth posting. The next attempt was at Lake Las Vegas, since the Ritz Carlton advertised a white sand beach, but though we walked the shoreline, there was no beach to be found. Maybe you have to be a registered guest.

Lake Mead, on the other hand, does have beaches, although with the lake falling about 10 feet per year since the late 1990s, they don't have much time to form before being stranded. At Boulder Beach, the lake is retreating down a gradually sloping alluvial fan and given enough time in one place, the waves can form small beaches. These gravel barriers were neat, separating small puddle lagoons from the rest of the Colorado River. Occasionally higher waves would spill over the top of the berm, carrying gravel down the backside to form little overwash fans.

Skookum Wulge

The mouth of Hylebos Creek, which emerges on the northeastern edge of the Puyallup Delta, is a dredged estuarine channel lined with fill and heavy industry. As you move out into the bay, the industry gradually shifts to marinas and eventually to residential development. This is one of few places in the Sound where log rafting has persisted into the 2000s.

Commencement Bay is home to many shoreline cleanup sites, some of which have been cleaned up, some of which are still in progress. Much effort has gone into not just cleaning them up but actually restoring habitat. I actually don't know much about the history of this site - it basically consists of a spit and a back-barrier lagoon. The feature has been here in some form or another for decades. I'm not sure what the original shoreline looked like here, but the large fill south of this site went in since the 1940s and I doubt there would have been a spit in this configuration prior to that. The spit itself seems to have consolidated during the past decade, perhaps as a result of increased wave energy due to removal of log rafts or the addition of additional sediment to the area in association with the clean up work. Another place to do some more homework on.

Brown's Point

This entry stems from a Saturday spent in Federal Way early in December. Brown's Point marks the northern entrance of Tacoma's Commencement Bay and began as a small cuspate foreland spit (cuspate foreland, low point, closed point). The sign suggests that the low backshore was filled by the Lighthouse Service in the 1920s.

The tip of the point, around the navigation marker, is armored with riprap, but there are small beaches on both sides. They consist of well-sorted reddish gravel, definitely not like other Puget Sound beaches. Interestingly, the gravel looks remarkably like the gravel used in the upland landscaping and I suspect that at some point in the past folks may have "enhanced" these beaches with this imported material. The beach at Salter's Point in Steilacoom is composed of similar gravel and I wonder if there is a common, somewhat manufactured, thread.

Flooding on the Puyallup earlier in November left an enormous amount of fresh wood washed up on the beaches from here on down into Commencement Bay.