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I hadn't been this far out the Strait for years, and then two trips in about a month. This particular morning I caught the 5:30 Edmonds ferry and made it to Bullman's by 9AM.
The shoreline out here is rocky, with beaches located only where some combination of shoreline configuration and local sediment sources conspire. Bullman's is a half a mile of pocket beach fed largely, as far as I can tell, by the stream that emerges in the middle. A rocky promontory at the eastern end keeps the waves coming in the Strait from spilling sand out that end. As with any pocket beach, it's orientation probably tells us as much about the angle of wave action on this beach as any sophisticated model would.
Kelp was washed up in berms at the west end, pushed against sandstone boulders that looked almost like highway department riprap (but for the most part, were not).
The backshore grades landward to meet the filled areas around the homes. This end of the Olympic Peninsula is being pushed up faster than sea level is rising (at least during the past century, but maybe not the next), so I'm guessing the shoreline is gradually marching seaward. But I wonder what the story with those huge stumps in the back beach near the west end - did they wash in (how?), or are they in growth position -- which might really complicate the story.
By all rights, there should be no beach here at all. This was once mud flats on the delta of the Puyallup River, but progress filled the marshes and the flats, bringing dry land as close to deep water as earth-moving economics would allow. This shoreline was marked by wharves and industry - and much of it still is. But the shoreline faces into the major fetch, raising the possibility of stable beaches, and as old piles and rubble have been removed, and as sand and gravel has been brought in to cap contaminated sediment, beaches are appearing.
This site is complicated - most sites are. A small pocket lagoon has been created in order to restore marsh and intertidal habitat, something rare in Commencement Bay. But the tide must come and go through an opening that the newly formed beach wants to bridge with a berm. Storms drive the gravel up the profile, building the small spit higher and pushing it into the mouth of the inlet, where it might potentially raise the sill elevation of the lagoon. One could engineer a "stable" configuration, but maybe it's better to let the tides and the waves sort this out themselves.
Once, the forested bluff rose directly from a narrow beach. High tides probably reached in among fallen trees and drift wood making walking on the beach difficult and canoes were probably the preferred mode of travel along the western edge of Port Townsend Bay.
In the 1880s a steel mill was built here, processing thousands of tons of iron a year. Wharves, foundries and fabrication buildings, charcoal kilns, and slag from the blast furnace spread across the site. The community of Irondale grew around the mill. But by 1900, the town's steel working origins were already history.
In the early 1900s, the whole shoreline from here north to the mouth of Chimacum Creek was buried under sand and clam shell dredged from the bay. The broad, flat, artificial landscape was a log storage yard well into the 1990s, when public groups stepped in to reclaim the site.
The legacy of the old mill remains. The forest grows from the moss-covered foundations of the buildings on the hill. Large concrete relics are scattered on the beach and the slag forms a small headland, resisting the southward transport of sand from the eroding shoreline to the north. Farther south, circular brick beehive kilns are eroding from the bank. The beach is littered with brick, slag, and all the other hard parts that were left behind as the sea transgressed back across the site.
It is now all part of Jefferson County's Irondale Beach Park. The northern segment was largely restored several years ago (I've written several times about Chimacum Beach) and now efforts are underway to clean up the less appealing leftovers of the old steel mill and restore the beach. The slag will probably go, along with lots of contaminated soil, and the shoreline will have to be reconfigured, but it will come back as a beach - probably not the narrow one at the toe of the bluff that existed 150 years ago, but a sandy one that encourages exploration. Historical aspects of the site will still be the central theme, a neat reminder that every beach has a story. Sometimes many.
Three months without a post! I need a bumper sticker that says "a bad day at the beach is still better than a good day of meetings". There have been far too many days of meetings although some have been good ones. And there have been far too few brief trips to the beach. In December, I checked out the recent renourishment at Lincoln Park. And one weekend I wandered out to Golden Gardens, the nearest beach to my house, simply since I hadn't been there in a long time. But somehow the pictures haven't made it to the blog.
Monday (now over two weeks ago) was a nice break in the office-bound routine. The roads of Mason County were empty and snowy and made for a pleasant trip to the site visit near Shelton.
I mentioned Allyn in a post earlier this fall from Manchester. They are both towns where boat ramps have been built to span the upper beach to minimize impacts on beach habitat and sediment transport. Because they are basically bridges, they require different engineering than conventional ramps. I'm not sure what happened here, but it is coming apart and has been closed for some time.
Saturday afternoon I took the kayak up to Everett and paddled across to Jetty Island. In the summer, the City runs a ferry over to the island and the main beach on the west side fills up with people enjoying the warm (relatively) water flooding in over the broad sand flats, but on this trip I had the whole place to myself.
The tide was high, so there wasn't much beach to walk on (and the upland portion of the island, at least the north end, is North America's densest thicket of Himalayan blackberry). I walked up to the northeastern tip of the island,
which was littered with remnants of old structures and lots of big wood, washed down the river and stranded on the beach. Then I wandered back to the main beach, the spit, and the lagoon.
Everett is located just south of the mouth of the Snohomish River (as was the historic Tulalip community of Hibulb, long before Everett Colby's father founded the city). The shallow subtidal foredelta of the river extends out into Port Gardner, making deep water access difficult, so a century ago, a jetty (training structure or breakwater?) was constructed to channel the main stem of the river southward along the waterfront (see the aerial photo linked to the title of this post). Dredged sand was placed on the western side of this structure and gradually a new island was built. In 1989, the Port of Everett used the dredged material to create an artificial berm - basically a spit, that in turn formed a large tidal lagoon.
Jetty Island is a Puget Sound anomaly. It is all sand, river sand, unlike most of our gravelly beaches, which get their sediment from eroding bluffs and small, steep streams. It is completely artificial - this entire area was shallow sand flats historically. And it is the largest beach nourishment project on the Sound and the only one built from dredged river sand. It is a frequently cited example (particularly by the Corps) of beneficial use (of dredged sediment).
Some folks note that the ecological picture painted at Jetty Island isn't really true restoration (they're right). Others seem more put off by the blackberries and invasive species than they are impressed by the salt marsh and the birds. And some people are just leery of pretty much everything the Corps of Engineers does (not an unwarranted skepticism). But ultimately, this is a pretty neat place. Maybe they ought to build something like this outboard of the Shilshole breakwater or along a section of the railroad grade!
