Golden Gardens

This time of year, the highest tides arrive right around sunrise. A couple of days after Christmas I headed out early to Golden Gardens to see the effect of the month's highest water levels. The predicted high tide was 12.7' above MLLW (Mean Lower Low Water or a "0" tide).  According to the Seattle tide gauge, the actual water level may have come in a couple inches higher.   These photos were taken 15-30 minutes after the peak tide.


This is not an unusually high tide.  A 13' tide (these numbers hold for central Puget Sound, but would need to be adjusted for other areas) occurs an average of 7-8 times a year, although the annual variability is huge.  Some years never see a 13' tide at all.  And in El Nino years, we may get 20 or 30!  (Alki Beach:  January 2010).  


The number of high tides at progressively higher levels falls off quickly.  In Seattle, Mean Higher High Water (the average of the highest high for every day of the year) is 11.35' - and we can expect a couple hundred every year.  As noted, 13' tides average less than 8 times a year.  And 14' tides take extraordinary conditions:  either a strong El Nino, like January 2010, or a big storm with a strong surge (February, 2006). Seattle's highest high tide was 14.5' and occurred on January 27, 1983 (another El Nino year).


In these photos at Golden Gardens, we see that the still water level is probably a foot or so below the sandy berm, but that the runup of the waves is just enough to send water over the berm crest.  Berm elevations vary and can depend on wave exposure and the abundance of gravel, among other factors, but 2' above MHHW is often a good place to start.


 


More on Golden Gardens:
Golden Gardens:  July, 2011

Golden Gardens

January 1st, 2020. New Year's Day. The sun came out. I was already in Ballard and somewhat impulsively decided to go to the beach. I wasn't the only one with that idea. 

Golden Gardens Park is located on Meadow Point, just north of the big Shilshole Bay Marina. It's got a long history, some of which I've mentioned in previous posts, but in the end, it is one of Seattle's nicest beaches and a great example of a fairly unconstrained urban beach. So many urban beaches in other cities are pocket beaches stuck between piers or heavily nourished beaches on intensely developed waterfronts. It's not that Golden Gardens has lost it's connectivity with adjacent beaches (it has) or that it hasn't been modified or nourished (it has, but not much), but it still looks and feels like a relatively natural beach. As long as you sort of ignore the marina, the railroad, and the crowds!

AERIAL VIEW

Previous Posts: Gravel Beach: Golden Gardens

It was a beautiful day. Kids were playing in the water (barefoot and sometimes wearing down jackets). Families had gathered to burn their Christmas Trees. A few people were playing volleyball. The playground was full. So was the parking lot.

Golden Gardens

It's amazing that in over 430 entries and more than 5 years, I have never posted anything from Golden Gardens, even though it's the closest beach to my home and does not lack for interesting stories.

Early on the morning of July 4th, the beach was still quiet. A few vans were unpacking for the day's activities and people were beginning to mark territory for the afternoon's celebrations, but not much more was going on.

The north beach is gravel and sand and has retreated over the decades, perhaps aided by railroad, which was built along the eroding bluffs to the north and eliminated a potential source of sediment. In the mid-1990s, the City chose to nourish the north beach and restore the wetlands behind the berm. Both have done well in the 15 years since.

Meadow Point (the name of the landform, Golden Gardens is the name of the park) is the site of one of the largest relatively intact (although by no means original or pristine) backshore dune areas found in central Puget Sound. Keeping the Scot's Broom and other obnoxious vegetation in check is a full-time job for the city and the park's volunteers.

North storms appear to dominate sediment movement at this site, since this shoreline is sheltered from the more common southerly waves by West Point. The large Shilshole Marina and it's breakwater to the south may also influence Meadow Point - they certainly represent an abrupt end to the beach south of the Park.

The southern beach is swash-aligned, forming a broad crescent that faces the southwesterly waves. It is broad and sandy and by later today will be filled with people throwing frisbees, playing volleyball, picnicking, and launching kayaks. The north beach tends to be more for beach walkers and kite flyers.

Unlike Seattle's other beachfront parks where fires are prohibited, here they are not. Which probably explains the remarkable lack of drift logs on the berm.

Dixie Lee wanted to put the aquarium at Golden Gardens. Wolf Bauer did not. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they argued about it, but in the end, the aquarium ended up on the downtown waterfront. This is neither the first nor the last beach that Wolf saved. Fittingly, Wolf was a key part of the design team that developed the 1996 beach restoration work.

Golden Gardens

Two posts back, at Lake Quinault, I noted that beaches are easy to make.  But that doesn't mean that they are simple, that they are all the same, or that they fail to exhibit an amazing amount of small-scale spatial and temporal variability.

A late afternoon walk at Golden Gardens found lots of stuff happening - much of which will be erased within a few tide cycles. And replaced with something else.

Waves on a rising tide will sometimes leave a swash bar like this sandy one lapped up onto the beach face.  Perhaps the band of gravel at the water line was the coarse lag left behind when that rising tide pushed the sand up the beach.  Seepage from the beach face formed complex alluvial channels on the lower beach face.  A high tide gravel ridge to the north recorded the story of strong southerly waves during a recent high tide.

Meadow Point is a barrier beach that curves sharply and there are big differences as you walk from the sandy beach on the south to the gravelly one on the north. By the way, this northern beach was probably always coarser than the southern one, but the current pattern was reinforced by the gravel that was added in the mid 1990s to address the chronic erosion of the northern shore (possibly attributable to the loss of sediment from the north after the railroad was built, but that's another story).

AERIAL VIEW

Wolf Bauer

West Point 2004

Golden Gardens 2011

Seacrest 2011

Brackett's Landing 2009

Ambleside 2011

Tolmie 2009

West Point 2010

Birch Bay 2010 

24 February 2012

Wolf,

As you begin your second century, I wanted to remind you of what an amazing difference you have made for Puget Sound shorelines and for the people who visit them.

You were instrumental in raising awareness of shorelines and in creating a demand for shoreline protection.  Today, it’s easy to take our beautiful beaches for granted, but without the amazing efforts of you and others in the early 1970s, this place would be a very unattractive place.  Your language and your ideas have remained lasting elements of Shoreline Master Programs across the state.

You described accretion beaches as an endangered species.  At the time, you may have doubted our progress, and it’s true that we have lost some special places.  But thanks to your work, many remain intact and more are becoming public.  Lily Point on Point Roberts is now a county park.

In the 1980s you spoke adamantly of the need to restore our urban beaches and to enhance the public’s shoreline experience.  But you did not just talk about it, you gave us examples.  Today, we have examples everywhere: in Seattle, Tacoma, Bremerton, and elsewhere.  And there are a new generation of projects such as the Sculpture Park Beach in Seattle and Marine Park in Fairhaven that were inspired by your example and carried out by impassioned individuals who had learned from you.

People enjoy our most spectacular urban beaches, yet many do not realize that these places were once buried in riprap and would be still were it not for your efforts.  People love the beaches at Discovery Park, Golden Gardens, Birch Bay, West Vancouver, and Tolmie State Park.  They think these places have always been this nice!

This year, we are mapping feeder bluffs throughout the Sound – the feeder bluffs that you taught us were such a critical element of the shore-process corridor.  Also this year, I was approached about what to do about salt marshes choked with cut logs from decades of sloppy log-rafting practices.  I jumped at the chance to share your presentation on this subject from almost two decades ago.

Increasingly, parks managers and and government regulators and fish biologists are looking for opportunities to restore beaches and to put sediment back into the system, not lock it away behind walls of rock.  People still build bulkheads, but doing so is widely discouraged and is increasingly difficult. In some places we are actually pulling seawalls off the beach and removing riprap from our spits.

Your legacy runs deep on Puget Sound and our shorelines are far, far better places today than they ever would have been without your incredible passion and your tireless commitment.

Thank you,

Hugh

NOTE:  Wolf turned 100 on February 24th. These photos, most taken recently, are all nourished beaches designed by Wolf in the 1970s and 1980s. Their captions link (in most cases) to previous posts on those places. Previous Gravel Beach posts mentioning Wolf can be found at:  Bauer Posts.

Edgewater Beach

Before 2005, this was an out of the way spot where a lot of folks came to run their dogs on the beach. There was a dirt parking lot behind an eroding bank, and a small pocket beach tucked into the corner formed by the eastern end of the old tank farm.

Then the Port of Everett built the Mount Baker Terminal, primarily to move large airplane parts up the hill to Boeing's plant at Paine Field. Mitigation for the pier included improvements to the beach, but until the last year or so it was still sort of hard to get down here. Now the park is open and there were dogs out running on the beach again.

AERIAL VIEW

There are really three parts to this beach. There is the western corner where the beach was before. The orientation doesn't really lend itself to stability and it tends to unravel (just as it did prior to the pier), causing erosion along its back edge and leaving a beach covered with smaller riprap and quarry spalls shed from the adjacent riprap. Sediment eroded from this beach ends up on the low tide terrace, with help from the streams under the pier.

The middle part of the beach is largely under the pier and isn't really a beach, but is actually the delta of the two creeks that emerge from pipes under the base of the pier. The creeks drain two gullies that lead down the hill above the tank farm. The creeks are very effective at redistributing beach sediment from the upper beach down to the low tide terrace, where it's hard to get it back. This appears to be the sink for some of the sediment added on both sides of the pier ten years ago.

The beach farther east stretches out for 1000' along the railroad grade and has done well. It's probably eroded back a little, but there's a nice berm, plenty of logs, and a heavily vegetated backshore where once there was just a towering seawall and no beach at high tide. 

Much of the sediment lost from this beach has simply spread out farther along the train tracks, which is exactly what was hoped for in the first place.

This was an expensive project and we may need some cheaper approaches, but it's an important demonstration of how we might eventually restore a lot more of the Great Northern Beach between Golden Gardens and Everett.

Blue Ridge

Seattle's Blue Ridge neighborhood lies on the hills that rise from the beach north of Ballard.  The community even has its own private beach access, but Sunday's low tide (-3.6' MLLW, so one of the year's lowest) made this a much more public beach, with a lot of folks walking between Carkeek Park and Golden Gardens.

AERIAL VIEW

A couple of small streams - not sure what distinguishes a stream from a stormwater outfall in these urban areas - emerge from culverts beneath the tracks at the Blue Ridge access. The larger one takes a sharp, but brief, right hand turn, before turning again down the beach.  I guess this suggests drift, or at least recent drift of the sandier material, is northward, although I think the larger pattern is the other way, since this area gets some shelter from the south.


The railroad dominates the upper beach - pretty much replaces it, actually - except for a narrow backshore right around the stream mouths.  But the lower beach goes out forever, or so it seemed today, when low tide sort of merged into the gray day.

Allyn

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.