Balestrand

The Sognefjord is the longest fjord in Norway and one of the longest in the world. It's more than 200km from it's innermost point to the ocean (though deciding where to draw that line is probably tricky). Balestrand must be about half way and is located along a central basin that is as much as 1000m deep.

AERIAL VIEW

The Sognefjord drains two of the highest and most glaciated of Norway's mountains, Jotunheimen and Jostedsalbreen, so it's no surprise that it was the path of a very large glacier during icier times. Flying over Greenland a couple of weeks later made it easier to imagine what this landscape must have once looked like. More than once, actually.

The bedrock yields limited sand and gravel from which to build beaches and the steep coastline limits the real estate on which beaches can form. The exceptions seem to be rare cases where geography and sediment conspire to form pocket beaches or adjacent to the mouths of some of the small tributaries, typically at the heads of bays. The Salish Sea has more beaches because the topography is less extreme and because the glaciers left behind a thick blanket of sand and gravel.

In Balestrand, there was a narrow cobble foreshore in places, but in this particular location, the construction of groins (jetties) and the addition of sand has resulted in a small artificial swimming beach. 

Orrestranda

Norway has a lot of coastline, most of which is steep and rocky, so I went into this trip knowing beaches would be scarce. One area where sandy beaches are more common is along the Jæren Coast, south of Stavanger, where a broad area of the coast is relatively low and marked by cultivated fields, not fjords and mountains (they're still there, just a few tens of miles farther inland). Like the south end of the Lista Peninsula (previous post) this area may be an old moraine.

AERIAL VIEW

The shoreline consists of sandy beaches, segmented by low headlands. The headlands, at least in this area, appear to consist of cobble and boulder lags, consistent with the moraine idea. The day was damp and windy, so my visit to this beach was brief. Apparently, there are also some nice coarse gravel and cobble beaches along this coast - but none that I saw. Maybe next trip.

Traveling north, we skirted the Stavanger airport and the huge oil field supply center at Tananger. I made due note of the large Schlumberger complex, a nod to a much older epoch of my geologic history (albeit in the Williston Basin, not the North Sea). Our day ended on an island north of Stavanger, reached by a series of deep undersea tunnels -- another chapter in Norway's engineering geology story.

Havika Beach

Just a short distance east from the previous post, the boulder field is gone, there is more sand, and pocket beaches have formed between bedrock headlands. We swung by Havika Beach (that's what I'm calling it - the Norwegian may translate a bit differently).

AERIAL VIEW

The beach was backed by a field of small dunes, although it turned out that some of the hummocks weren't actually dunes at all, but were underlain by bedrock knobs (or very large boulders).

Lista

The Lista Lighthouse (Fyr) sits at the southwestern corner of the Lista Peninsula near the southern tip of Norway. We were staying in Farsund, just east, and drove out after dinner. There's not much of a beach, and I didn't get down to water's edge anyway, but the shoreline itself was fascinating.

AERIAL VIEW

The broad coastal strip slopes very gradually to the sea and is strewn with large boulders. I suspect that this is a moraine, but I don't know enough about the regional glacial history to speculate more about its origin. 

The aerial photography suggests that in some places cobbles have been rearranged by waves to form indistinct berms, but for the most part the boulders seem to be scattered randomly and the waves don't seem to have had the persistence to create any real shoreline morphology. I suppose this is due to the durability of the underlying surface and the lack of mobile sediment, perhaps combined with an emerging coastline?

Grenen

The northern tip of Denmark - of Jutland, more specifically - is a large spit that curves northeastward into the water between the Skagerrat (towards Norway and the North Sea) and the Kattegat (towards Sweden, and eventually, the Baltic).

AERIAL VIEW

The aerial image shows a series of curving beach ridges that record the growth and the migration of this sandy point of land over hundreds or thousands of years. My observations from the ground, besides driving across the coastal plain and old ridges, were mainly out at the tip, where the dunes give way to a low point of sand that eventually disappears beneath the sea.

The beaches are a mix of sand and gravel (as all my favorite beaches are), although the two express themselves quite differently from one place to the next).

The southeastern shore, past the lighthouse and down toward the town of Skagen, is protected by a series of segmented breakwaters. These suggest that this shoreline is retreating - or at least trying to - and is cutting into the beach ridges as it goes. Skagen itself is located behind it's harbor, which is heavily protected behind large jetties.

There's probably a great story about beach evolution here, and one that I suspect has been written about by people much more informed than I - although perhaps in a language I can't read.

Amager Strandpark

 Amager Strand lies just south of Copenhagen, not far from the airport. It's a nourished beach on an artificial island - and relatively new (2005). From what I can tell, the island was built offshore of the original beach - which is now the landward side of the lagoon. But it's possible I don't have this story quite right.

AERIAL VIEW

The beach faces east, toward Sweden across the Øresund. A line of wind turbines lies offshore and the Øresund Bridge can be seen to the south. The shape of the beach is constrained by jetties and piers that act as hard points and keep the sand from getting away.

It was pretty quiet on the day we visited (several weeks ago), but it's an easy train or bike ride from the city and I suspect it gets packed on warm summer days.

Yellow Island

Yellow Island sits in San Juan Channel, one of the small Wasp Islands between Orcas and San Juan Island. Like all of these islands, it consists primarily of metamorphic bedrock and most of the shoreline is marked by rocky cliffs. But also like on many of them, there may be patchy deposits of glacial drift, which form an erodible substrate that forms small bluffs in the few places it reaches to the water.

AERIAL VIEW

At each end of the island, small spits extend out to rocky ledges, creating tombolos, with small gravel beaches on both sides of each. In addition, there is also a pocket beach below a low bluff on the south shore of the island. 

On some rocky islands, the dearth of erodible sediment and the abundance of shellfish and barnacles on the resistant substrate gives rise to beaches consisting primarily of shell  debris. But as far as I can see, the beaches here are primarily gravel, presumably derived from the glacial deposits -- although there's not an obvious active source of this material, aside from occasional erosion of the toe of the bank associated with particularly major storm events. Of course, what we don't know is whether there might be a source, or at least a reservoir, of sand and gravel in shallow water offshore.

According to Phil, who has been watching this place carefully for a long time, the eastern tombolo is subject to significant changes from year to year. In particular, the cobble on the south beach is sometimes exposed (as on this trip), but may be covered in gravel some years. The fact that the beach changes significantly from year to year is not surprising, but understanding what drives this is more challenging. On a low tombolo like this, there may be large transfers of gravel back and forth across the berm during high tide storms from one direction or the other.

For more on the Preserve:
Yellow Island: The Nature Conservancy

And for a first hand account of life on Yellow Island:
Island Time on Yellow

Weaverling Spit

The new beach at Weaverling Spit has progressed in three phases, the most recent of which was completed this past fall.

AERIAL VIEW

Each phase was designed a bit differently, reflecting slightly different site conditions, objectives, and perhaps lessons along the way. Of course, I suspect budgets and permit requirements were slightly different on each phase, too. All three involved beach nourishment, combined with planting of the bank/backshore and the use of anchored logs as small sills or groins.

Phase 1, farthest west, is 9(?) years old now and looks great.

Phase 2, in the middle, was done a few years later. The nature of the anchored log sills was different - the root masses were oriented differently and they were placed fairly high compared to the adjacent beach grade.

Phase 3 is still fresh and I assume plantings are planned. The folks who rent out those RV spots probably don't want trees and thick brush, but there are a lot of good options. The berm is much larger, although I suspect this is a function of the backshore being lower here than on the earlier phases.

Note the log placed perpendicular to the beach immediately west of the boat ramp at the easternmost end of the project. I assume this was to limit the movement of the added sediment onto the ramp - which might be expected since the new nourished beach is slightly higher (and there's a slight tendency for eastward drift of material along here anyway). I'll be curious to see how well this works.

There's more on this project at:
CGS: Weaverling Spit

And here's a link to all of my posts from here:
Gravel Beach: Weaverling Spit

Kukutali Preserve

 

I love this little tombolo between Kiket Island and Flagstaff Point, particularly the arcuate fine gravel pocket beach on the north side, which sort of underscores the challenges of simplistic beach classifications. While the overall landform is a tombolo, a type of barrier beach, this particular beach acts in most ways like a pocket beach - not an unusual situation. The one complication might be that under the right conditions, sediment might get carried to this beach by overwash from the south side, slightly confusing the otherwise simple picture of a pocket beach as an isolated sediment cell with negligible import or export of sediment.

The south beach gets more wave action and collects logs (south winds push them onto the berm on high tides). The north beach is more protected and logs don't accumulate, since south winds blow them off the beach (if they ever make it there in the first place).

Visitors are discouraged from tromping across Flagstaff Point in order to protect the vegetation community on the relatively rare rocky bald (I think that's the right name). Around the edges, we could see the Camas coming up and the rock outcrops were covered with sedums.

For shots from previous visits, check out Kukutali 2016 and Kiket Island 2009. And for a nice view of Kukutali from the air, check out the drone footage at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDrCZl65kA4'

Hidden Beach

Hidden Beach is hard to find. It's tucked in at the base of a high bluff along Saratoga Passage, at the bottom of a steep road that most folks on the main road don't even know exists. Even when you get to it, the beach is still sort of hard to find. It's buried beneath rocks and fill and old concrete and the occasional auto part. A row of piles out on the beach testifies to the original intentions, but this stretch at the north end was never developed, or if it was, little is left of it now. 

AERIAL VIEW

Years (decades) ago, I came down here and walked north to check out the wonderful high fluted till bluffs and some large glacial boulders just offshore. I don't think I've been back since, although I often look across at this shoreline from Cama Beach (on Camano Island), just across the water. 

The Hidden Beach community to the south is a great example of a type of development that is pretty common on Whidbey Island (elsewhere, too). Or was - most of the initial earthwork occurred in the 1950s and 1960s - you could never fill on top of the shoreline like this today.

Here's what it looks like on Ecology's Coastal Atlas: Aerial Photos

I've heard different versions of how these places were built, but basically the developer built a seawall out on the beach and then filled behind the bulkhead, burying the beach and creating building lots where logs once floated and fish once swam. They added just enough fill to raise the building sites above (most of) the highest tides. The fill material typically came from the bluff itself. Sometimes they used equipment, sometimes they used hoses, and sometimes they used dynamite.

The result was small, isolated beach communities that were wonderful escapes in the summer but that were squeezed beneath landslides from above and storm waves from the Sound in the winter. And an access road that would become impassable just when folks most needed to get out.