Sculpture Park Beach

This wraps up our tour of pocket beaches along the Myrtle Edwards shoreline.  This is the best known and the best documented and I've posted shots of it before.  I still love the way this beach attracts people, both physically and visually.  It's a nice contrast to the seawall to the south and the riprap to the north. It's also an interesting contrast to the two nearby pocket beaches described in the previous posts.


January 2007
November 2008
January 2010

Denny Way CSO

Still in Myrtle Edwards Park, this small pocket beach is associated with the new Denny Way Combined Sewer Outfall.  A few years ago, an intertidal gravel berm was added, and this coarse-grained beach is the result. I know almost nothing about the history of this project and would be curious to know what else has been done in the intervening period (Same site:  June 2008).


Blogger's new LOCATION option below is nice, but it doesn't seem to allow me to control the default zoom.  It still gets you to the correct place, but not at the initial scale I want.   Here's this beach framed so as to avoid confusion with the two other small pocket beaches on both sides: Denny CSO.

Myrtle Edwards Park

The beach and high bluff that marked the original shoreline is hundreds of yards inland at the foot of Queen Anne Hill.  Elliott Avenue, the railroad, and Myrtle Edwards Park are all fill (most derived from the leveling of lower Queen Anne and the regrade, I believe), which means the park's waterward edge drops pretty steeply to subtidal depths.


Most of the shoreline is riprap, which may be effective at preventing the fill from eroding back into the Sound, but which is ugly and makes getting to the water unappealing and difficult.  Shorelines are special places.  Industrial ones require industrial solutions, but public ones require imaginative and welcoming ones.  If rock is necessary, maybe an investment in better rock would be a start.  Vancouver has used large granitic boulders on its English Bay shoreline, which encourage sitting and even allow safer access to the water itself.  Sure it's more expensive, but it's also a nice place to linger, not just roller blade past.


But best of all is when the the configuration of the shoreline allows beaches.  This one is somewhat incidental, I believe, but could probably be expanded.  It flies in the face of anyone who would argue that the energy or the steepness of the shoreline preclude a sandier beach.


There is another pocket beach just down the shoreline at the Denny Street outfall - they added gravel to a small pocket a few years ago and it's shaped up nicely.  And a little beyond that is the Sculpture Park beach.  I'll add pictures of those in subsequent posts.  There is talk of incorporating beaches into the reshaped central waterfront, too.  I suspect as we move farther south, the beaches will continue to become progressively more engineered and less natural, although this may have more to do with design firms and big budgets than any natural limitations of the sites.  I'll put in a strong plug for imagination and for learning from natural examples.

Useless Bay

Useless Bay got its name from George Vancouver, who found its sandy shoals useless for larger boats.  The shallow bay represents one of the larger sand traps in Puget Sound.  Converging spits have formed at the north end of the bay, partially enclosing Deer Lagoon (now largely diked).  (Aerial view)  Homes line the primary spits on each side - homes where families can enjoy wide warm sand flats in the summer and ponder the significance of future sea level rise during the winter. (Useless Bay: February 2006 storm)

The first picture is from Double Bluff park on the west side, where a fascinating network of sand spits have grown and shifted during the course of the last couple of decades.  There is no shortage of sand - both in the bay and coming from the big bluffs just around the corner.

The second picture is from Sunlight Beach on the east side of the bay and shows the remnants of Henny's Spit, which disassembled itself in the mid-1990s and continues to try to sort itself out.  Part of its problem is that as new spits form, they starve existing spits down drift, leading to erosion, breaches, and instability.  There is also a complex interplay in these sandy systems between offshore bars and subaerial spits.  Maxwelton, three miles south of here along this same shoreline, also suffers from an overactive beach (Mackie Park).

Bush Point

Bush Point is a cuspate foreland, a low triangular point protruding west into Admiralty Inlet on the west side of Whidbey Island (see LOCATION below). It formed where wave action from both north and south conspired to accumulate sediment.  Waves are more prevalent from the south, but can also be significant from the north.  Perhaps just as importantly, the landform itself shelters the coast north of the point from the southerlies, giving the northerlies an additional advantage.  As the point grew, it secured its own future, drawing sediment to itself from both directions.


The shoreline north of Bush Point consists of high bluffs and several very large landslides, some more recently active than others. A small chunk slid last spring, taking out part of Susana Drive, but it was small compared to the much larger dormant slide that extends to the north.  Looking north from Bush Point, it looks like there was plenty of movement last winter and if this fall is wet, the story may not be over.


I suppose whatever comes down the hill will end up on the Bush Point boat ramp a year or two from now.

Mariner's Cove

Once upon a time, this bowl on the shoreline east of Oak Harbor was probably a lagoon, surrounded by salt marsh, and cut off from the rest of the Sound by a narrow spit.  Northerly drift would have forced the tidal inlet to the northern end, where remnants of what may have been its ebb-tide delta are still visible as scattered gravel bars in the nearshore.


This site, like so many, is best appreciated in an aerial view, which you can to through the LOCATION tag at the bottom of this post.


At some point, presumably when the developers dredged out the canals and created the building lots, the inlet was relocated to the southern (updrift) end of the spit and jetties were built to maintain the channel.  Sediment builds up against the south side, but the beach to the north gets nothing.  The result is a starved beach consisting of a lag of coarse gravel and cobble.  Anything finer is trapped beneath this pavement of larger stone. The beach is almost flat, since there is no mobile gravel or sand for the waves to build into a normal beach face.


There's been talk for years about placing sediment dredged from the shoaling inlet onto this beach and I believe the community is close to making it happen.  It will be interesting to watch.  There are a few other bypass operations - all small by national standards - on Puget Sound.  Point Roberts, Keystone Harbor, and maybe one or two small private marinas like this one.

West Edmonton

This is a blog about beaches and I have sometimes gone out of my way to find beaches where others might not expect to find them.  There's not much to say about this one, other than it's a pretty popular place.  It doesn't have some of the dynamic aspects that attract me to most beaches - but I guess there's no troublesome erosion, either.  Unlike most freshwater beaches in this part of Alberta, it doesn't freeze in the winter.  The waves come and go, generated by some sort of mysterious force behind the proverbial curtain.  It's surrounded by the 800 or so stores of the West Edmonton Mall.


The previous days have seen few beaches, other than the one at Clear Lake that I previously posted about, but we've seen many rivers, all of which are captured (if only briefly) in my other blog.  The Missouri River (Chamberlain, SD), the Cannon River (Northfield, MN), and the Mississippi River (St. Paul, MN) all drain into the Gulf of Mexico. The Red and the Assiniboine (Winnipeg), the South Saskatchewan (Saskatoon), and the North Saskatchewan (Edmonton) all flow into Hudson Bay, via the Nelson River.


Blogger/Google has changed some things, which explains my occasional playing with different thumbnail sizes and layouts.  It also means that the link to the map/aerial that I've traditionally provided by clicking on the title of the post, is now done by clicking on the location at the bottom of the post.

Clear Lake

High in the mountains of Manitoba...well, everything is relative, particularly the mountains of Manitoba.  Much of Manitoba is as flat as a cornfield - and some parts, like the huge leftover lakes Manitoba and Winnipeg, are even flatter.  But Riding Mountain National Park rises above the prairie and supports a rolling landscape of birch and spruce forest.


Wasagaming, on the southern shore of Clear Lake, is the only major development in the park, and by development, we mean vintage tourist cabin resorts and a public beach.  The beach here must be packed in the summer, but it seemed a bit out of place and I suspect it isn't original, or at least it isn't what this shoreline looked like two hundred years ago.  After all, where would all this nice raked sand have come from?


The best beaches on Riding Mountain are much more subtle and I couldn't capture them in pictures.  Lake Aggasiz, back in glacial times, lapped against the northern and eastern edge of the hills leaving a series of beach ridges that are now covered in aspens.  Which I guess means that this post continues the theme of the last post, which also deals with the shorelines of long ago lakes.

Lake Missoula

15,000 years ago, Missoula was underwater.  Something like 40 times.  And each time the ice dam would break and the water would race across Idaho and Washington and out the Columbia Gorge to the Pacific.  But between dam breaks, the lake carved shorelines into the hills above the University.


Saturday morning (September 2nd) I hiked up to the "M" on Mount Sentinel, which provided great views of the strand lines across the way on Mount Jumbo.  They show up well in the low light - but are pretty subtle when you're actually climbing across them.


Lake Bonneville (July 2007)

Lily Point

Lily Point would have made a spectacular resort or development, but it makes a better park. Lots of hard work over many years led to its acquisition and recent dedication as a park and a marine reserve. This is the forested southeast corner of Point Roberts, a few steps removed from the residential development of Maple Beach to the north and of South Beach and the Marina to the west. For most Americans, visiting it requires a passport, since you must cross the border (twice) to get here.

From the tip of the point, you can look south to Lummi Island and Mount Constitution, northeast to the high rises of New Westminster and Burnaby in the Fraser Valley, and southwest to the Gulf Islands. On a clear day, Mount Baker rises to the east.

Lily Point itself is a cuspate foreland, bracketed by high bluffs. The bluffs to the north are bare and steep. The bluffs to the west consist include a large, deep-seated landslide, and is well-forested except in its steepest sections. It has all the classic symptoms --soft clay exposed on the beach itself, a steep shore bluff and a steeper head scarp, separated by a forested bench. I don't know how often it moves, but in the late 1990s, local residents in the area reported noise and dust when a big section let go.

Waves from the south erode the southwest bluff, carrying sediment both west to South Beach (where the sediment is periodically bypassed around the marina entrance) and north around the point towards Maple Beach. Maple Beach in the U.S. and Centennial Beach and Beach Grove on the B.C. side are part of a large complex of spits formed over the millennia by the erosion of Lily Point and then incorporated into the fringe of the Fraser delta.

Lily Point is by no means pristine and over 100 years ago it was the site of a major salmon cannery - remnants of which mark the beach on the north side of the low point. Native Americans/First Nations peoples apparently fished the point historically, but neither they nor the salmon were much of a match for industrial fishing.