Shell Beach

I missed this and will try to insert into chronological order, which will probably confuse one or two people who actually read these things as they come out. I am also going to keep the entry very short.

Shell Beach is on the northwest side of the tombolo that connects the main part of Montague Harbor Provincial Park (on Galiano Island) to the Gray Peninsula, which would be an island in the absence of the tombolo. There is a small salt marsh and lagoon, and a second, smaller tombolo, on the more sheltered southeastern side of the barrier beach, facing out into Montague Harbor proper.

AERIAL VIEW

The beach itself is rich, and white, in broken shell - thus it's name, I assume. On a summer afternoon it captures the sun and there were no shortage of people enjoying both the beach and the water. My photos actually come from both days of my visit (my base for my two-day exploration of Galiano was a walk-in campsite in the Park). I went for a paddle in the yellow boat on Monday afternoon, watched the sun set from the beach Monday evening, and came back and walked it on Tuesday afternoon, before heading for the Hummingbird Pub for dinner.

Dionisio Point

Dionisio Provincial Park lies at the northern tip of Galiano Island, across Porlier Pass from Valdez Island to the north. Technically, it's marine access only, but with some sleuthing, there are ways to get there without a boat. But don't tell anyone I told you.

There's a beautiful little tombolo connecting the rocky island (which I think is Dionisio Point proper) to the rest of Galiano. Arguably, one might call it a small cuspate foreland that's trying to become a tombolo, since the tip probably goes underwater at many high tides. The southern side of the spit is somewhat sheltered within a rocky bay, so wave exposure may be greater from the north. The northern beach is more fully developed and there were overwash features consistent with north to south wave action. At the same time the bar at the tip also showed signs of current flow from south to north. This would be an interesting spot to watch at a very high tide.

AERIAL VIEW

Interestingly, the northern beach is also much sandier than the southern one, which consists of a fairly uniform gravel lag. I suspect it takes pretty unusual conditions to move material around very much on the south side, whereas the northern beach looked to be much more active.

The sandstones out at the point displayed the neat tafoni weathering that's so characteristic of these Nanamimo Group rocks.

Besides the tombolo, there was a nice little pocket beach around the corner to the northwest. And in between, what was once a substantial Salish village (Quelus', perhaps linked with nearby modern Penalakut Tribe). Here's a link to an NPR story from a few years back: KUOW, 2011.

As is often the case, there is more about some of these Galiano sites on my companion blog:
hshipman: Galiano 2017

Matthews Beach

This beach at the southern end of Galiano is associated with Mathews Point Regional Park. It's also Shore Access #15, one of many on the island (Capital Regional District: Shore Access).

I've been checking out this beach from the ferry for twenty years as we pass through Active Pass on the way to and from the other islands, but this was my first visit (since it was also my first time on Galiano). The beach usually looks pretty empty, although occasionally I see a few folks who've made it down the steep trail from the road.

AERIAL VIEW

It's a pocket beach - at least it's contained by two rocky headlands with little opportunity for sediment to bypass the bedrock points in the deeper, fast-moving water offshore. But it defies some of the usual stereotypes of pocket beaches.

It's hard to characterize it as swash-aligned since wave action is probably messy and strongly impacted by boat wakes (mainly ferries, but lots of other traffic, too). There's not a lot of fetch across Active Pass's narrow channel and large waves are probably pretty limited. 

Sediment to the beach is provided by eroding bluffs of glacial sediment and possibly from a gully at the west end. The beach generally is sandier at the east end (sand and small gravel); much coarser (large gravel and cobble) at the west. I sort of imagine that any new additions of sediment make up for gradual loss of sediment offshore.

It's a great place to watch ferries - which are frequent.

Morning Beach

I'm playing catch up again. A long road trip intervened, so the next few posts date back to mid-August when we made our annual pilgrimage to Salt Spring Island. This year, I took two days on my own to explore nearby Galiano Island.

Morning Beach, not surprisingly, faces east and on a less hazy day one would probably look directly across the Strait of Georgia at Mount Baker. 

AERIAL VIEW

Like so many pocket beaches in the Gulf Islands, this one is contained by resistant sandstone headlands that reflect the regional strike of the folded rocks (Cretaceous Nanaimo Formation). Sandstone ribs, also on the same strike, break up the beach at the south end. The beach is pretty sandy, which I suppose is some combination of glacial cover and eroded bedrock.

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.

Double Bluff

I've been slipping. Maybe I was thinking I was going to write something longer, but just didn't seem to get to it. It's summer, after all. But I've had a bunch of pictures from Double Bluff in the queue for more than a month and if I don't do something with them, they'll sit for another month. So I'll post the photos with minimal commentary, hoping it will allow me to move on.

Double Bluff is the distinct light colored cliff you see when you look north up the Sound from the Edmonds ferry. It is a long, straight stretch of high bluffs, oriented perpendicular to the maximum fetch. One of several notable "swash-aligned" bluffs on the Sound.

It's a cross-section of older interglacial fluvial sediments (Whidbey formation) overlain by Vashon advance outwash and till (though that stuff is high above the beach). There's a lot of variability in the sediments - not a terribly simple layer cake. And there are some fascinating deformation features that always capture attention and cause arguments among geologists.

AERIAL VIEW

You often see big chunks of peat on the beach - coming out of the Whidbey, so they date back a glacial cycle or two. There's a big boulder at the east end. Chuckanut, apparently, with a big fossil palm frond on top (something like that, I'm no botanist). Started near the equator, traveled to Bellingham, then got delivered to south Whidbey 18,000 years ago. Give or take a few thousand years. It's not going anywhere right now.

Fort Worden

It seems like all my recent posts have been from the Strait - the Miller Peninsula, the Elwha, and now, the northeastern corner of the Quimper Peninsula. But recent is relative. This Saturday excursion to Fort Worden was back on the 10th, but if you've been paying attention the last ten years, you know that sometimes my posts run a bit late. Always in order, but often delayed. If you've been following along, you also know that my photos and my narrative don't always align terribly well.

The beach walk was part of a grand loop around the north side of Fort Worden. We began with low tide on the north side of Point Wilson, where we could look at the curiously distinct and squared off boulder field and the wood debris sticking out of the beach along its western edge. Bulldozers, faults, or coastal retreat across a back-barrier lagoon that used to sit below a steep forested slope? And how does that relate to the big divot in the bluff that looks so much like a singular landslide, but which doesn't explain why the coastline itself jogs as well.

AERIAL VIEW

The beach along North Beach is great, with sand, gravel, big boulders, and occasionally glimpses of the underlying platform. But it's somewhat overshadowed - figuratively and literally - by the bluffs themselves. At the eastern end, it looks like Whidbey Formation, including a surprisingly continuous peat layer a few feet above beach level, overlain by Vashon stuff. But as you move west, the layer cake has been disturbed and late glacial Everson (so I'm told) appears - mainly gravels, but with some amazing ripups of the underlying glacial material. Something pretty exciting happened here during the waning stages of the last glaciation - it took a lot of water moving very fast to leave that kind of deposit (and it's much better exposed than my last visit). Is this evidence of Puget Sound (Lake Russell?) spilling out around the edge of the retreating ice? Or something else.

The walk back along the top edge of the bluff was a lesson in periodically relocated fence lines on the bluff (always to the south) and big artillery (the big guns are all gone, but the batteries and the views remain).

Credit for the day goes to Michael and Kitty and Leslie and all the other folks at:
The Jefferson Land Trust Geology Group

Valley Creek

The mouth of Valley Creek was opened up a long time ago (10-15 years?), creating a small estuary out of once had been industrial fill, that I suppose once was a beach and a small estuary. In the last couple of years, the city completed the next phase of the park, which consists of two engineered beaches on the shoreline immediately east of the creek.

AERIAL VIEW

There have been a significant number of pocket beaches built on urban shorelines in the region, but this is one of very few that have been built as a pair. The idea has been proposed, but usually gets nixed due to costs and some basic geometric challenges. Constructed pocket beaches need to be oriented into the waves. And they need to be confined - either by existing promontories (usually old fill in urban areas) or groins.

This poses problems when a pair of beaches need to be oriented obliquely to the overall trend of the shoreline. The groin that separates them must often be a major feature, with a large difference in elevation from one side to the other (see aerial). This means a lot of rock is exposed (in this case, on the east end of the western beach). This in turn probably makes it harder to keep the higher beach from leaking through the rock structure - there was a little evidence that some of this might have happened here.

This site still seems pretty bare. It will be nice to see it with more vegetation, more landscape elements, and a few more amenities. it would be nice if we could incorporate more sand into these steep pebble beaches, but that's tough when you want stuff to stay put and your geometry requires the steep beach face provided by permeable, well-sorted gravel.


Here are links to some other constructed pocket beaches (some are very much the same, some are very much not):

Boulevard Park: 2014 (Bellingham)
Sunset Beach: 2016 (Vancouver)
Brackett's Landing: 2016 (Edmonds)
Sculpture Park: 2017 (Seattle)
Ross Bay: 2013 (Victoria)
Maumee State Park: 2010 (Ohio)
McKinley Beach: 2016 (Milwaukee)