Changing beaches: Kalaloch

2 March 2014 photo taken of beach wood at the base of coastal bluffs on Kalaloch Beach in Olympic National Park. 

This post is a bit different, in that it focused on changes to shorelines over very short time-scales...a few years, probably driven by forces that don't have anything to do, at least directly, with people.  It will hopefully come as no surprise that shorelines are one of the most ever-changing landscapes on the planet, subject to pushes and pulls from both the water and the land.  They change all the time, so on some level it shouldn't come as any surprise that Kalaloch Beach in Olympic National Park has changed dramatically in the past few years.  I wanted to focus on the huge logs that are a very notable feature on the shorelines of Washington State, particularly on the north coast, and that used to pile up at the top of the beach near Kalaloch Lodge.  At some point in 2015, the logs accumulated on the beach near Kalaloch Lodge were stripped away, and haven't yet returned:

12 March 2021 photo of coastal bluffs on the beach near Kalaloch Lodge.

We still don't really understand why they were stripped off the beach here, and probably more importantly, why new large wood hasn't recruited back to the beach.  Its also not clear if the obvious erosion of the bluff at this location has anything to do with the removal of the large wood.  All that we know is that, in the space of just a few short years, the beach looks very different.