Dungeness … ah, the beach!

August, 2021

This was our last full day at Dungeness Recreation Area campground. We’d been here 5 days and hadn’t yet been down onto Dungeness Spit. So that’s where we headed today. Everyone from that group camp had gone home … so our walk promised to be a quiet walk.

As we walked downhill from the campground, down the long road that would end at the “foot” of the spit, this was the view out along that LONG spit …..

If you can enlarge the photo above enough, you can see the lighthouse way off in the distance on the right side of the photo above … five miles away. That’s how long this spit is, 5 miles!

But here, let me zoom in for you so you can see the lighthouse. 🙂

We friends were tempted to walk out along the spit, but instead of turning right at the foot of that long road and then walking along the spit … we turned left when the long road reached the beach. We found a wonderfully deserted beach in front of us, an amazing bluff on our left, and the saltwater of the Strait of Juan de Fuca on our right. What a day! Please enlarge the photo below if you can … it’s glorious.

 

Everything was wonderful … the beach, the bluff, the sunshine, the ocean air … ah me. 🙂

Oh, hey! Look who’s coming towards us …

 Mom and teenage daughter.

They didn’t pay much attention to us, or so I thought. And then I noticed Mom giving me the “stink eye” as she trotted past (below).

Her daughter was just a happy-go-lucky kid and didn’t even glance over at us.

 

In the photo below, you can see their tracks in the sand.

 

The bluff is about 120 feet high/tall. It is continually being eroded by wind and rain and storms from the Pacific Ocean and the occasional mild earthquake hereabouts. The Strait of Juan de Fuca gets major storms in off the Pacific Ocean. In fact, I found this on an official State of Washington website: “In 2020 an overhanging imperiled home was removed from the top of an eroding feeder bluff ~ 2 miles west of Dungeness Spit. Grant funds were pursued, but the project was not funded. The landowner paid out of pocket for the work and Coastal Watershed Institute donated staff time to manage the removal to prevent a home from falling into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.”

In fact, further along on that same website, it was reported that the home was hanging out over the edge of the bluff by five feet. Yikes. This area really can be dangerous in a storm.

Notice the tree (in the photos above and below) that came crashing down in a nose-dive from the top of the bluff. Just what’s left of the tree (not it’s whole original length/height) was about 40 feet tall/long. Imagine how big it was before the top parts had been smashed off because of the crash into the beach. And imagine what all of that sand/dirt weighs. People do come out to places like this during winter storms, hoping to see a landslide like this one. I hope they aren’t standing right under one!

Some of the landslides expose really interesting geology.

 

Below … more trees, even taller than the one in the photo above.

I liked how sunlight touched just the two ends of those two trees above. By now it was later in the day and the sun was finally making its way around to shine on the beach and parts of the bluff.

And then we came upon this giant (below). It definitely did not come down from the bluff above. It had obviously washed in from the ocean. All of us made up stories about where it must have come from … Alaska, eastern Russia, New Zealand. It was about 5 feet in diameter at the big end on the left.

 

 

The photo below is looking from the smaller end up towards the larger end. It had been in the ocean so long that the ocean had leached out the softer parts of the grain in the wood. And yet, it seemed to all of us that this tree still had life. Maybe it will find peace on this beach.

After we had fun thinking up stories about this tree, we decided it was time to stop walking and go no further down the beach. We felt an affinity with the tree and so we stayed for a bit.

We sat, we napped, we watched small waves roll in on the beach, we watched the sun move across the sky and watched seagulls fly overhead. We explored the beach along the water’s edge, or we clambered in among the driftwood. But all of us stopped. We didn’t talk, we just stopped and loved the moment and this place.

Sigh … and then eventually, we headed back up the beach, back towards the path/road that would take us back up to the campground.

But still, on our walk back up the beach, there were structural formations in the bluff that we hadn’t noticed before when we had walked down the beach.

The one below was pretty cool. See the small opening at the bottom of the bluff?

 

Some imaginative person had placed those stones, just so, in that opening. It was almost as if just that one tiny stone on the top of the pile was holding up the entire bluff/cliff.

That reminded me that each one of us is important. Each one of us matters. Ok, maybe not in a world-wide sort of way necessarily, but we are important in our own lives, our own families, friends, co-workers, neighbors, and communities. What we do has an effect. We matter. Like that small rock on top of that pile, each one of us holds up a bit of the bluff, a bit of the sky.

Ok, enough of that. 🙂 We headed back to our campsites for one last evening’s repast. We’d be leaving tomorrow morning.