I guess all our readers know what trees are. But Dean has a fascination about the trees deposited on the ocean beaches. For those of you (maybe two) who aren't familiar with our beaches, he offers the following:
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In days gone by, the beaches were often populated by logs that had escaped from log rafts, large groups of cut logs towed loose surrounded by "boom logs" – big logs tied together by (what else?) "boom chains". Individual logs were often rolled out of the rafts by big waves, and ended up on the beaches. Several small companies of "Log Patrols" would chug along the shorelines, snake cables around the beached logs, tow them free and sell them back to the logging or milling company. (The logs had brands carved, painted or burned into them.)
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Today, logs are almost always carried as deck and/or hold cargo on log-carrying ships on the open ocean. Not much gets loose. Some are still towed in rafts on the inland waters of Puget Sound, but they are chained together in bundles of 20 or 30. These seldom get loose – we haven't seen a bundle of logs on the beaches here in 20 years.
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But there's still a bunch of wood on the ocean beaches. Not logs, but trees. Trees that grew along the sides of creeks and rivers. In the northwest rainy season from August to June, big rains cause the creeks and streams to flow mightily, eroding the banks and undercutting the trees. Some fall into the stream/river and are dragged downstream by the current, grinding off limbs and roots as they go. Many of them reach the ocean, where they float onto the beaches and are hammered twice a day by breakers, rolling around and usually loosing any remaining branches or roots, until a really high tide leaves them stranded for days, weeks, or more.
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So when we visit Kalaloch Beach (pronounced "clay-lock"), we like to hike the beaches and theorize on how some of the trees got here. From some far-away creek, or from the river just half a mile south? This year's "crop", or something that's been here for many years. Some of the "big honkers" five or six feet in diameter have been here for 50 or more years, driven far enough up on the beach that even high tides have no chance of re-floating them.
Others are obviously new, still with bark and/or branch stubs or root balls. They haven't been banged around enough to "clean" them.
We check out this tree every year to see if it's fallen yet. The dirt slid out from under it years ago, and it hangs by it's roots. Still there!
A special thrill when we come here some years is to see a big high tide with high surf --- a storm --- when many beach logs are floated loose and flow in and out with successive waves, sometimes crashing into the "old" logs stuck on the beach, or the beach banks themselves. A lot of energy there.
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Many of the beached logs are broken off at thicknesses of a foot or more.
At the river mouth, we've seen 30 foot logs flipped end-for-end in the surf. There are warnings about messing around with logs in the surf, and one only has to watch the action for a few minutes to understand the wisdom of those warnings.
This year, the overnight tides are high enough to move a few of the logs, but the day tides are a couple of feet short.
We can see that today's logs are not exactly where they were yesterday, but we choose not to get up at 4am to see them move. Maybe next year!
