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.

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.