Ruby Beach, Olympic National Park

Complementing last week's post about Ozette village, lets stay out on the coast for a bit.  Back in June the Forks Forum published a historic photo of Ruby Beach that dates, I think, to the 1930's.  Here it is:

Photograph of Ruby Beach, probably from the 1930's.  Unknown source, but published by the Forks Forum on their Facebook page on June 18.  

This photo really blew me away, as I had no idea that this site, which is now a very popular hike-in day use area along Olympic National Park's coastal strip, was used in this way.  The site is striking, in part because of the very prominent sea stacks and promontories visible in the background of this photo...which also make the modern perspective very easy to recreate.  A few weeks ago I did just that after a visit to Kalaloch to do some field data collection.  Here is the modern view:

Photograph of Ruby Beach, 26 June 2020.

If you look closely at these two photos you can also note some very minor, but obvious, landscape changes along the bank of Cedar Creek in the near field, and to the sea stacks in the far field.   Rocky stacks along Washington's coast seem permanent, but are continually changing and eroding...a process that we typically can't "see" unless we have the chance to view the changes over long time-spans, like the roughly 80-90 intervening years between these two photos.

Ozette...another (not) "lost" community

A few weeks ago I posted about Port Crescent, calling it a "Lost City".  There are a number of places along Washington's coast that people used to call home, but now don't.  Many of those places, like Port Crescent, were abandoned due to economic or demographic forces.  Some, like Ozette, were abandoned for different reasons: according to sources I've spoken to within the tribe, the residents of Ozette were more or less required to leave when their children were required to attend school, but no school was provided to the village.  People had to leave. But its definitely a misnomer to call Ozette "lost"...it is very much alive in the hearts of many and clearly not truly lost.

Ozette was one of the five main village sites of the Makah, and in the 1890's the site was heavily developed:

1890's photo of residences at Ozette.  Photo courtesy of the Burt Kellogg collection, hosted by the North Olympic Library.  

The site is now on a small sliver of the Makah Tribe's reservation, surrounded on all sides by the extraordinary wilderness coastal strip of Olympic National Park.  Here is today's view:

29 June 2020 photo of Ozette.  The building in the foreground is an abandoned National Park Service building.

Ediz Hook Part Four: The Light House

I think this will be the last one for a bit on Ediz Hook...time to move on to other large spits!  But for number 4 I wanted to stick with the old stately lighthouse that used to grace the end of Ediz Hook...an area that has now evolved into a sort of storage lot for the USCG base that now takes up the end of the Hook.  Here is an 1890 photo of one of the first Ediz Hook lighthouse (there was another built in the early 1900's):

Ediz Hook lighthouse, 1890.  Photo from the Bert Kellogg collection, hosted by the North Olympic Library System

So this photo is a bit hard to place exactly, given that you can't make out any landmarks in the photo.  However, if my placement of the fog bell that I covered in this previous blog is correct, then this is roughly the modern perspective of the 1890 shot above:

9 June 2020 photo of Ediz Hook.  Photo by Ian Miller

Again, impressive changes to this impressive place on Washington's shoreline.  BTW this original Ediz Hook lighthouse (or perhaps one of the later buildings?) apparently still exists as a house in Port Angeles.  One of my earliest Coastnerd Gazette entries attempted to tell the story...