Bachmann Park

Bachmann is a small park in Manette on the east side of Bremerton. It's located on Point Herron along Port Orchard. The beach itself consists of well-sorted gravel and is fairly steep, pressed up high against a tidy concrete bulkhead. It had the look of a nourished gravel beach, although I suspect it is not. 

AERIAL VIEW

Sediment movement along here may be a little complicated. There's some fetch from the southwest. But the greatest fetch may be from around the corner to the north and I suspect this may drive some material towards this point from Enetai to the north. This is also a site that may be significantly influenced by boat wakes and this area may be discussed in some of the Rich Passage ferry studies.

Seahurst Park

I visited Seahurst Park three times this spring - once between meetings in other places, once for a meeting at the park, and once for a great sunset with M after an impromptu trip to Zippy's Burgers in White Center. These photos date to first of these, way back in the third week of April.

The work at the north end was largely wrapped up at the end of last summer (Seahurst: August 2014) and the beach has had a winter to begin to sort itself out.  The beach itself looks nice - with the well-sorted gravel giving way to bands and patches of sandier material. The berm has readjusted a little, possibly at the expense of the skinny back-beach wetland, and the restored stream mouth is looking very natural, with flow disappearing into the gravel berm.

The south end shows little evidence of the old seawall that was removed in 2005 and I think most folks wouldn't have a clue of its history. The beach itself looks fine, but the toe of the bluff looks quite different than the toe of the unaltered bluff south of the park. That would be fun to come back and elaborate on in a future post when I can do a better comparison.

Guerrilla Films has just released a nice documentary about the park and its restoration:
Local Treasure: Trailer on Vimeo

Elmira Street

Elmira Street Park, on the north edge of Port Townsend, is locally known as The End of the World. This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it's certainly the end of the trail. It got a lot of attention two winters ago when some large chunks fell away (see video from 2013 below).

I visited the top briefly in April*, but stayed back from the edge and didn't linger, even though the likelihood of anything happening during my brief stay was low. But it's always hard to know how undercut the bluff is or what might trigger a collapse.

These bluffs of glacial drift are fairly coherent, form a steep face, and tend to fail as large slabs. These topples from the upper half of the bluff are encouraged by gradual erosion of the underlying units and by wet periods and/or freeze-thaw events.  The collapsed material is quickly redistributed by waves and in this case most is destined for Point Wilson a couple of miles to the east.

There is a small concrete observation post dating to World War II at the edge of the bluff. Rough estimates of erosion rates along here are 6 inches per year, but that suggest the structure was built 30-40' back from the edge (in the forest?)  I suspect it was built closer than that - better views of the water - and retreat isn't as rapid as those earlier estimates.  Dramatic when large slabs fall, but not the end of the world.

* I'm embarrassed to point out that this visit occurred way back in early April. This spring things fell behind, in part because of a slow-moving hard disk failure that took a long time to diagnose, then to replace. I liked my little Sony laptop, but when faced with the need to retire it, I decided to switch back to a Mac. For those who care, I rely heavily on Picasa to manage photos and it seems to run very nicely on the Apple.

Over the next week or two? I will try to gradually backfill both this blog and my companion hshipman blog with posts I drafted this spring while my hard disk was grinding to a halt.

Otter Bay

This was our last stop before getting in line for the ferry back to the mainland. We parked off of Niagara Road and M read in the car while I walked the muddy trail down to this small beach in a northern corner of Otter Bay.

AERIAL VIEW

It's a small, sandy pocket beach.  I suspect the sandiness is due to steep slopes and a small stream that supply it with upland sediment and to its pocket nature, which keeps the sand from leaving once it arrives at the beach.

This is the last of my Pender Island posts and I should make two acknowledgements.  The first is to Theo Dombrowsi, whose Secret Beaches of the Salish Sea (The Southern Gulf Islands) has been a valuable resource, both here and on Salt Spring Island.  The other is to the Pender Island Parks and Recreation Commission and its volunteers, who have done a wonderful job of making so many beaches available, of marking them well, and of maintaining the trails and stairways.

In usual fashion, all nine of my Pender Island posts are labeled, and can be found at:
Gravel Beach [Pender Island]

Finally, this is the 700th post to Gravel Beach since December of 2005. The collection keeps growing and I trust that it is occasionally helping someone to stumble on a new beach or to look at an old beach differently.

Bricky Bay

Bricky Bay is a small cove and pocket beach on North Pender Island that was once home to a brick plant - rows of pile stubs crisscross the shore and the beach itself is a wonderful mix of native gravel and red bricks in various stages of rounding and disintegration.

AERIAL VIEW

There are also some nice shots at the Island Home blog (also links to other nice Pender Island photos and artwork).

Boundary Pass Drive

This was one of many nicely marked public beach access points around Pender - at the end of a short trail between residential properties. This particular one was a short walk from the cabin where we were staying on South Pender.

AERIAL VIEW

If it had been swash-aligned, it would have been a very nice pocket beach, but the predominant waves probably arrive obliquely and are further complicated by a lot of offshore islets and reefs. There's not much sand and gravel - just a thin band at the base of the bank - and the shore is mainly cobbles that probably roll around in storms, but don't go too far.

The central portion of the beach was backed by a low bluff of glacial material, eroding into someone's treeless lawn.  A new stairway was being built at the far end of the beach to replace one that had succumbed to falling trees and possibly a collapsed bank.

The most intriguing thing was the spherical boulders or concretions weathering out of the sandstone.

Port Browning

Port Browning is the name of the bay, the community, and the marina (and the pub), although apparently the beach is called Hamilton Beach* (and lies at the end of Hamilton Road). Pender Island's primary (and only) shopping district, Driftwood Center, is located half a mile inland.

AERIAL VIEW

I suspect this may be the longest single beach on either of the Penders, although if you look at the map, you might note that it's really only half a beach. It extends across the south side of the bay but abruptly ends at a small rocky knob, just short of the marina. There appears that there may have once been a small marsh - maybe even a lagoon - behind the berm and under the lawn, but not any more.

*Hamilton Beach is probably better known for blenders and kitchen mixers, but there is apparently no connection to Pender Island. Hamilton and Beach were two employees of the company when it was begun in Racine, Wisconsin, back in 1910. Thank you, Wikipedia!

Poet's Cove

This small pocket beach faces northwest towards the head of Bedwell Harbor (Medicine Beach).The resort - which is a bit out of synch on an otherwise low key kind of island - climbs up the hill behind the beach. The marina and Customs station (this is a convenient place for boaters to check in when they cross the boundary) extend out into the cove. The resort is closed (well, they allow tourists to wander through) so everything was pretty empty.

AERIAL VIEW

The beach, like many, is a combination of mineral sediment and shell debris. Pocket beaches tend to form in coves, which correspond to valleys in the landscape, and therefore are often fed by small streams. And these streams carry sediment - in this case, both glacial and Cretaceous I suppose - from their watersheds down to the beach. For the sake of geologic accuracy I should point out that the clasts within the Cretaceous Nanaimo Group are presumably much older than that.

The shell on beaches around here is mainly clam shell, washed up from lower on the beach face, and barnacle fragments, washed off rocks on adjacent promontories or the piles that support the docks.

I liked the way the shell had piled up on the upper beach - right against the bulkhead and even up and over it (I wondered if some of this had been spread over the rockery as a landscaping touch, but I think a bulk of it ended up here naturally.)

Gowlland Point

Gowlland Point, assuming I got the geographic names correct, is just northeast of Brooks Point. It's built from a massive reddish conglomerate and has a navigation marker on the tip. The view to the southeast includes the San Juans (the international border is only a mile or so offshore) and Mount Baker (in the clouds today).

AERIAL VIEW

To the north of Gowlland Point - and below the stairs at the end of the road -- is a pair of coalesced pocket beaches. The rocky ledge that divides them includes both a conglomerate with heavily weathered cobbles and some spheroidally weathered gravel beds, but what really stood out was an amazing boulder of heavily altered rock on the beach itself.

Brooks Point

Brooks and Gowlland Points (on South Pender Island) are adjacent and some of the descriptions make it a bit hard to distinguish the two - not that it really matters. I believe the more northeasterly point, and the more distinctive one, is Gowlland, which I'll save for the next post. The top photo is of Gowlland, taken from Brooks (or so I think). The second is of Brooks, taken from Gowlland.

Both points, and everything else around here, are carved out of strongly folded Nanaimo Group conglomerates (Cretaceous) - which I think I first learned about during an orientation field trip at UW more than 30 years ago!  Nanaimo sedimentary rocks - which are not all conglomerates - form most of the southern Gulf Islands.  The aerial view shows the extent to which sedimentary structure controls the shape of the islands.

AERIAL VIEW

I wish I had photos of the gigantic boulders in the forest on the way here along Gowlland Point Road. From some drive-by geology - and some inferences from Google Earth - they look like rockfalls along the steep ridge between the road and Greenburn Lake. I suspect they are old - maybe they are blocks of the conglomerate that fell off the cliff or out of the edge of the glacier when the ice retreated?