Yesterday I had the immense good fortune and honor to be on the beach as some of the first canoes came ashore for this year's Canoe Journey, hosted by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. The theme of this year's journey, "A River Reborn" is a great one, but in my mind doesn't quite convey the full scope of the restoration associated with dam removal, only because when most of us think of a river, we think of the part of the river that flows downhill. But the Elwha River restoration is a great reminder about how connected those rivers are to the surrounding shoreline and coastal zone. To try to convey that point I want to focus on the place that canoes came ashore, here, at a point around 1000 m east of the river's outlet into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. This spot on the beach is very much part of the story of transformation associated with dam removal.
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| August 2011 photo of the Canoe Journey landing area |
Back in 2011, a month before the dam removal started, the lower part of this section of shoreline was very cobbly, with a narrow sand and gravel beach backed by a vertical eroding scarp. It would not have made for a good place to land canoes that can weigh, in some cases, up to 2000 pounds. That same section of beach now has been utterly transformed by sediment released by the dam removal.
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| May 2025 photo of the beach at the Canoe Journey landing area |
And while landing a huge canoe like the ones that came ashore yesterday cannot be easy, the transformed beach, I think it is fair to say, made it just a bit easier.
We've told the story of the response of the Elwha shoreline writ large to dam removal
elsewhere, but here are some before/after beach profile and shoreline position data specifically from the Canoe Journey landing spot:
In the plot at top the black line is my most recent survey data from that location, collected in May. The orange line is a profile collected in August 2011, just a month before dam removal started. The beach is notably higher, built up by additional sediment from dam removal, and also shifted seaward by something like 50-100 feet. The shoreline position time-series at bottom is also interesting, as it shows that the beach continued to erode after dam removal started, until about mid-2014, after which there was a period of significant seaward beach growth. Since that time this part of the beach has wiggled around a bit but largely held its position.
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| August 2011 beach substrate photo collected at about +3 feet elevation on the beach |
Beach profiles, though, only show us the shape and position of the beach, and don't tell the whole story of the transformation. Back in 2011 this beach was also relatively coarse across much of the beach face. The photo above, for example, is from August 2011 and was collected at just about the elevation of the beach that canoes were nosing ashore yesterday was I was watching around 10am. This same elevation on the beach now looks like this:
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| May 2025 beach substrate photo at about +3 feet elevation on the beach |
This is the transformed, and much more pleasant, surface that paddlers were able to leap on to as they brought these big canoes ashore:
A huge thank you to the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe for the on-going support for the various monitoring and research project that I do on the shoreline, often with colleagues from USGS, Washington Department of Ecology, UW and others. Also, thank you for the opportunity to volunteer at this year's canoe journey, and the opportunity to observe the landings yesterday.
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