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We spent the second week of September on the road again. Between Seattle and Minnesota again. We're getting pretty good at it, even though we never do it the same way. As usual, there was plenty of neat scenery and some geographic highlights, but not many beaches. This one in Coeur d'Alene was the only one.
AERIAL VIEW
I know little about this one - other than it is called City Beach. It lies west of the big resort complex and east of the lake's outlet (the start of the Spokane River). It's oriented pretty much toward the greatest fetch on this part of the lake. It stretches west from Independence Point - a headland formed by a stepped concrete revetment that even includes a little waterfall and a moose.
I believe the lake level is controlled by the dam at Post Falls, several miles downstream, and is therefore likely higher than it was naturally. And in recreational settings like this, beaches have often been created, sculpted, or at least supplemented with additional sediment. But I really don't know much more of its history. It would have been fun to explore a little more, but this was the last day of a long trip and we were anxious to get home. I grabbed coffee at Calypso's and we were on our way.
For those more interested in our road trip than in beaches, you can always check it out at:
hshipman: "roadtrip2014"
These photos were taken way back on August 27th, just a few days after Seahurst Park reopened after being closed for year. At some point, I'll come back and post a longer follow up on the recent project, but I'm still in catch-up mode and will stick to little more than a few photos.
The bottom line is that the beach has been restored, an awful lot of old seawall and riprap and fill removed, and a small stream daylighted. All the responses I overheard from the folks wandering around were positive, although I suspect some were also just trying to line up what they were seeing with what they remembered. The seawall was a useful reference point and now most of it is gone.
AERIAL VIEW
Seahurst Park: January 2014 (during construction, with links to earlier posts)
This was a very quick stop at the end of the day (back during the third week of August), but enough time to see how this new beach was sorting itself out. I posted from here last fall, but the weather was awfully bleak and the photos awfully gray. At that time, I said eventually I'd post more, and I guess that't still likely, but it's not now.
Bottom line - very simple (they're never really simple) beach nourishment along the toe of the bank a couple of years ago with a lot of initial reorganization of sediment.
AERIAL VIEW
The site is along the west side of March's Point, north of the old railroad trestle (now Tommy Thompson Trail).
I've fallen way behind - a week in August on Salt Spring and another week driving back and forth from Minnesota in September resulted in some beaches being collected, but not yet stuck in the album. So I'll add them quickly - with abbreviated comments - so I can check this off my list.
This is a neat park on the site of the old Scott Paper mill. The site has been cleaned up. Two new breakwaters were installed to replace the dilapidated timber wall that used to protect this side of the entrance to Cap Sante Marina and to provide shelter for small boats launching from the new pier. There was always a small pocket beach in the cove on the park's north side, but the low tide beach is no longer a tangle of rotting wood and the upper beach is clean gravel, not broken bricks and debris.
AERIAL VIEW
There's a lot more that I'd like to add about this site, but that will have to wait for a future post.
Technically, this post is slightly out of order, since I meant to post it after Beach Grove and they sort of go together. Centennial Beach is just updrift (south) of Beach Grove and is essentially the Canadian extension of Maple Beach on the U.S. side.
AERIAL VIEW
Centennial Beach is just the most recent of a series of spits and wetlands that have formed on this northeastern shore of Point Roberts, much of which is encompassed within Boundary Bay Regional Park. The aerial view provides a nice glimpse of the complex geomorphology of this area.
Causeway Beach is basically the southern edge of the causeway that serves the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal. I don't know how much intention went into building this beach, or whether it is just an artifact of the gravel-size material eroding out of the armored fill. Regardless, this beach would not have been here before the terminal was constructed - this was just the wide flats of Roberts Bank.
AERIAL VIEW
The beach has an impressive fetch to the south. Its orientation makes it unlikely that it has any significant source of coarse sediment, other than from itself. And it's not a uniform width - it undulates along the south side of the highway - in some places there is a wide backshore (little more than a rough gravel parking lot) and in others it narrows to nothing and the roadway is protected by newer riprap.
Every year, I end up in Richmond or Tsawwassen early on a Saturday morning in August, prior to catching the ferry over to Salt Spring Island. And every year, I have a choice of beaches to visit. This year, I went back to Beach Grove (2009) and Centennial Beach (2009).
AERIAL VIEW
Beach Grove is built on low land - old spits, marshes, that kind of stuff - on the eastern side of the Tssawwassen-Point Roberts hill (once an island, before claimed by the growing Fraser River delta). It receives beach sediment from Lily Point and Maple Beach to the south, although most of this material probably wound up in the series of spits that form Centennial Beach. Most of Beach Grove's shoreline consists of a narrow foreshore in front of a continuous lone of concrete seawalls. Offshore are the broad tidal flats of Boundary Bay.
Beaches can be narrow for a lot of reasons. In this case, I suppose they include 1) a dearth of coarse sediment from the south, 2) the fact that the community was pretty much built on top of the berm and backshore, and 3) the broad fine-grained flats essentially bury the intertidal beach (the flats intersect the beach face at a very high tidal elevation).
This past year, a new beach took shape in Bellingham at Boulevard Park. The park inherited a large area of historic fill on which a log mill once operated. Unattended, fill tends to erode away, and to prevent this the foreshore was covered in riprap and old concrete debris. The lawn was a nice place to listen to a concert or throw a frisbee, but getting to the water was a treacherous walk through a dump.
For many years folks have talked about making this shoreline more friendly, and finally, last year, the city went forward with plans to excavate some of the old fill, reconfigure the edge to complement the incoming waves, and construct a gravel beach. This was the first chance I'd had to visit since it was completed.
AERIAL VIEW
Orientation is a key factor on these sites and sometimes the shoreline you're given isn't consistent with a stable pocket beach. In this case, the local designers employed a rock groin at the northeast end and even added a small rock hook at low tide to keep gravel from getting away. I understand there is still considerable offshore aerial transport of the pebble, but it would take a lot of kids throwing a lot of rocks to put a big dent in the local sediment budget. And the waves will tend to move some of them back - with time.
Now if the city could figure out how to clean up the rest of the debris along this shoreline, this could become the crown jewel of what will ultimately become a wonderful string of pearls along the Bellingham waterfront!
This is the western of the two spits that form the entrance to Port Gamble bay. Point Julia, on the east, was described in the previous post. It's likely that this one was fairly similar, but it's tough to tell, since the mill was built in 1853 and the spit was significantly altered by the time of the 1856 T-sheet.
AERIAL VIEW
Development of the mill site involved extensive filling of the back shore and beach areas, probably with dredged material, and then protecting this with walls and whatever rubble was available. Wharves and piles extended farther out to allow deep water access to boats. The existing shoreline edge is an accident of the historic development and its shape reflects the requirements of handling logs and lumber.
Now, with cleanup and redevelopment planned, there is an opportunity to make adjustments to this hard edge that would result in a more appealing, accessible, environmentally functional, and low maintenance shoreline. This would require thinking about the configuration of the edge - and the relationship of individual segments to wave action. Based on the beaches that already exist between rubble headlands, I suspect one could keep just a few hard segments (hopefully done in something nicer than broken concrete) and enhance pocket beaches between them. Not saying this will happen, just that it would be nice!
The entrance to Port Gamble - the bay - is marked by two spits. The one on the east is Point Julia and is actually a recurved spit or a cuspate foreland. The one on the west, below the town of Port Gamble, may have looked similar, but is now lost beneath the old Port Gamble mill site. I'll come back to that in my next post.
AERIAL VIEW
Point Julia lies on the lands of the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe. It's a complicated feature due to the presence of a couple of small stream mouths, but the primary tidal marsh drains out through a narrow channel near the tip of the point. It looks like there's been some fill added to the old berm and marsh and it's possible this has influenced the plumbing a little, but unlike its counterpart across the channel to the west, this one still works!
