The Dungeness Pier, a look to the south

For a while I've been wanting to try to replicate this 1909 photo looking south from  a spot out in Dungeness Bay (about here):

1909 photo looking south, taken from the deck of the old Dungeness pier.  Photo from the Burt Kellogg collection.  

There are a few things that are just arresting about this photo - notably that its a panorama view, made of multiple photos physically aligned and presumably taped or glued together, and that it was taken from the now-gone Dungeness pier.  The pier was really quite long...3/4 mile when it was originally built in 1890-91...and it really had to be to reach deep water at the edge of the active delta of the Dungeness River.  This pier was the key bit of infrastructure connecting the products derived from forests, ag land and waterways of the Sequim prairie to the rest of the world, and the pier served the larger cargo boats and ferries that were calling at Dungeness at the time.

I finally had the chance today to try to recreate this view while I was on my way out to Dungeness Spit by boat:

9 June 2021 photo looking south from the water...

Its actually quite hard to confirm that I've got it exactly right...but its close at least.  The mountains provide good clues in the background, but today's clouds obscured some key summits.  Interestingly its really quite hard to place some of the closer landscape features in the historic photo, perhaps because the landscape has changed so dramatically in this area (it is, after all, an active river delta).  This paper by the University of Washington's Brian Collins is a really fascinating and rich description of those changes...and well worth a look, if not a full read.  

 According to this article the dock served a useful life for about 50 years, after which it decayed until its removal as part of a restoration project in 2018-19.  Its still visible in many aerial photographs, and of course blog co-conspirator Shanon Dell had the same idea as I did, but acted on it much sooner, collecting this photo in December 2014, before the pier remnants were removed:

December 2014 photo by Shanon Dell