Where once there was a beach....

Filling the former beaches and estuaries of Washington's coast to create the urban shorelines that we now see has to be one of the single biggest changes made to our coastal landscape in the historical period.  Fill is ubiquitous along urban shorelines in the Salish Sea...and I often assume that the process of filling these shorelines, which basically involved moving massive quantities of mixed sediment into the intertidal zone, must have been traumatic to the coastal ecosystems.  This set of photos from near the mouth of Valley Creek in Port Angeles also clearly illustrates just the simple loss of habitat that filling brought with it.  This is an interesting view looking landward from the very mouth of the creek, taken I'm guessing in the late 1800's:

Looking landward from near the mouth of Valley Creek, Port Angeles.  Photo from the Bert Kellogg collection, hosted by the North Olympic Library System.

The photo itself focused on the first electric light generating station in Port Angeles, in the white building on the hill.  But it also provides a view of the former shoreline near Valley Creek.  The perspective from the location is now quite different:

4 March 2014 photo by Ian Miller

The modern view really hammers home the massive changes that filling has wrought on Washington's urban shorelines.