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.

Another view of Ozette

I posted about the Makah village of Ozette a few weeks back, and went back out to the site last week to do some survey work with staff from the Makah Tribe.  While there I had the chance to replicate a historical picture of the village that was given to me by Paul Gleeson, former Cultural Resources Director for Olympic National Park, and former site manager at the Ozette archeological dig (Paul is mentioned in this article about the dig).  So Paul passed on this photo, that he suggested was likely taken in the late 1800's or early 1900's:

To be clear, I DON'T know where this photo came from, or who to credit for its appearance here (if a reader does know more about this photo, please reach out).  But it is such an interesting perspective on the village site, as it is shot from Tskawahyah Island, so provides some sense for both the southern stretch of the village site, and also what the village would have looked like approaching from the sea (which presumably was the way that most people arrived and left from the village back at this time).  Here is the contemporary view from the same spot:

View of the Ozette Village site taken on 24 August 2020

This modern photo was obviously taken at a lower tide, but some of the sea-stacks, and even individual boulders and small rocks in the inter-tidal are shared in both photos.  There are obvious differences in the vegetation on the slopes behind the village - probably not a surprise given how many people lived here.  What I really like about the historic photo, though, is it provides a sense for how far south on this point people lived...well into the area that is now part of Olympic National Park and heavily used by backpackers for camping.  

Ballard Shoreline Aerial Comparisons - 1940 and 2020

 Here's a fun comparison of the 1940's Ballard / Seattle shoreline and the current view from Google Earth.  

The now view is of the Seaview Avenue shoreline at the entry to Salmon Bay and Shilshole Bay at the location of the now Ray's Boathouse, former Anthony's, Ballard Elks Club, Sunset West Condos and the south corner of Shilshole Bay Marina.  

The bit of land across the channel is the NE corner of the Magnolia neighborhood.  

The 1940 view shows a different less developed shoreline with the reindeer ship, the SS Bering beached in front of the now Elks Club.  In the 1940's, the Tregoning Boat Company was located there.  

I believe the Ballard ferry landing was just south of (or above here) of Ray's Boathouse (to Port Ludlow and Suquamish).

The older photo also shows more beach homes across from Seaview Ave. Only a few are left now along with a few condos and misc buildings.  

From a surfing perspective, Point Shilshole is the point of land jutting out in the older photo. There's a nice wind swell rolling in and whitewater just offshore and along the shore.  

Looks like a good surf spot. We surf freighter and wind waves on Shilshole Bay so without the extra development and marina, we'd have one more downwinding and shore break spot!

Below is a Now and Then view from the Ballard Elks Lodge with the SS Bering looking out into Shilshole Bay. The ship was burned to make way for development in the early 1960'.  Now view from the Ballard Elks Sunset Cam.

Ballard Boat Works 1905 and Present

Sivert Engelsen Sagstad, a young Norwegian boat builder emigrated to Seattle and opened Ballard Boat Works, pictured here on lower Salmon Bay, pre-Locks in 1905.

I paddle past this shoreline weekly and have been trying to look for any early evidence of his boatyard and as well as any Shilshole tribal evidence which was prevalent along the shoreline prior to the boatyard.

When the Ballard Locks were being developed some of the shoreline below the boatyard was removed. In the 1905 mage, note that the shoreline had a gentle slope to the water.  In the Now images, the shoreline is shorter and abruptly drops to the water. 

Read more about Sagstad and the 70' Viking ship replica in this article from HistoryLink..  Read the HistoryLink story 

Ballard Boat Works in 1905 and 'Now' view from Seaview Picnic Park

'Now' view from Seaview Picnic Park (location of yellow arrow)

2020 view of approx Ballard Boat Works location.  Photo: Salmon Bay Paddle

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Dungeness Spit: The Lighthouse, Part 1

Yesterday I wrapped up the last of three days of annual shoreline survey work on Dungeness Spit, which took me out to the lighthouse area.  The scene here is completely different than what you find on Ediz Hook, in the sense that visiting the lighthouse on Dungeness Spit is a lesson in constancy...at least over the historical period.  Here is what I mean.  This is a photo from the turn of the century (exact date unknown) of the lighthouse complex on the end of Dungeness Spit:

Turn of the century photograph of the New Dungeness Lighthouse, originally built in 1857.  Photo from the Bert Kellogg collection, hosted by the North Olympic Library System.  

Here is roughly the same view (I didn't get the perspective quite right), approximately 120 years later:

7 June 2020 photograph of the New Dungeness Lighthouse.

Its amazing to me how much is similar between these two photos.  I'm sure there is a long story behind how this amazing set of structures has been preserved, but my suspicion is that a lot of the credit probably goes to the New Dungeness Light Station Association, an organization dedicated to the maintenance of this place.  

There are, of course, some interesting differences that I didn't note until I had the chance to examine these photos carefully.  First off, the light tower itself is shorter...apparently due to a tower shortening project conducted in 1927 (see the history assembled here).  A few buildings are missing - a fog signal building and privy, for example, that are shown in the historic image above aren't in the modern view.  In the historic view you can also make out a tram on rails that ran to a dock, and was used for transporting supplies from off-loading ships to the lighthouse.  There is no trace of that tram in the modern photo above though you can find bits and pieces of it still scattered in the adjacent dunes:

4 August 2020 photo looking east from a point west of the New Dungeness Lighthouse, showing what I take to be pieces of an old tram used to move supplies between a dock and the lighthouse.

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.