A Kalaloch state of mind

 

Manual panorama of the bluff edge at Kalaloch Lodge, 2 September 2016

I've been spending a lot of time of late thinking about Kalaloch. The main reason is that over the past few years I've developed and delivered a whole series of talks on Kalaloch, culminating most recently in a full one-hour presentation as part of this winter's Olympic National Park Perspective Series (that is available to watch here). That built on a few previous, more science-y sorts of talks presented at NPS Science Days in 2024 and 2025, the first of which is available here. That sort of thing always forces me to try to dig into a place a bit, and ring as much of a story as I can out of whatever insight I can find.

The issue at Kalaloch, or at least the issue that consumes my thinking, is erosion of the coastal bluffs there.  In the two panoramas above, taken from about here in 2016 and 2025, you can get some sense for this erosion. Back in 2016 the bluffs in this area were just at the tail end of a period of relative stability and were covered with vegetation.  Over the subsequent decade erosion in this zone just to the north of Kalaloch Creek appears to have accelerated, and the bluffs are now actively eroding, and nearly vertical.  

User-submitted photo from Chronolog station OLY-102 located here, taken 29 February 2024

That rapid erosion has had some significant consequences, including impacts to the trails and stairs used to provide access to the beach, as well as threats to bluff-top cabins rented through Kalaloch Lodge. Olympic National Park, in collaboration with Delaware North, the current concession-holder at Kalaloch Lodge, have instituted a cabin removal program to ensure that at-risk cabins are not occupied, and don't present a risk to human safety. The strategy is quite simple - when the bluff edge comes within 5 meters of a cabin, the cabin is closed and slated for removal. The cabin in the photo above, for example, was removed just a few weeks after that photo was taken:

User-submitted photo from Chronolog station OLY-102, taken 22 March 2024

I think there is more to come from the work that I and others have been doing to try to understand bluff erosion at Kalaloch. In addition to the monitoring that I've been doing at the site for more than 10 years, we also now have our five Chronolog stations at the site, that have been heavily used by visitors and are archiving a record of conditions at Kalaloch that we've only just started to fully utilize. The current erosion has also prompted some examination of the history of the site, which suggests that change is nothing at all new at Kalaloch. The map below, for example, was put together by Olympic National Park, and overlays a 1940s era site map on a more modern aerial photograph of Kalaloch:

There is a lot going on here and it takes some time to digest, but provides some  sense for how much the infrastructure on the site has changed through time (a story that is told admirably by David Emmick in a number of his books about the coast), and also how much the bluff has changed in the last 50 years (the 1974 bluff edge on the map comes from shoreline change assessment work done for Olympic National Park by the Washington Department of Ecology, published in 2002). But one thing that struck me about the 1940's map is what appears to be a sort of embayment where the Kalaloch Creek channel is now. Some of the early historical references to the site talk about "Kalaloch Cove", and this map suggests a waterbody that suits that name used to be there. In my mind this also hints at even more profound changes to the shoreline at the site than what we are seeing now. That is compelling to me, and I'm hoping to be able to continue thinking on the evolution of the shoreline at Kalaloch.