Botanical Beach

 

Easter Monday: I planned to work in the garden, perhaps do a little sewing. Tim looked at the tide tables and suggested a trip to Botanical Beach. No contest there. I packed a lunch while he made a thermos of tea and off we went. Botanical Beach is on the west coast of our island, just where the Strait of Juan de Fuca begins. The point of land barely visible in the above photo, across the Strait, is the northwesternmost point of the contiguous United States. 

An easy 20-minute trail from the parking lot leads through quiet and deeply green forest to the beach. A strip of sand littered with driftwood logs is the perfect place to perch while watching the waves roll in from the Pacific. 

The real draw to this beach is the exposed rocks and tide pools where one can get closer to the ocean's surge and fall. 

Watching the waves build and roll in, then crash against the rocks, and throw up sheets of spray and foam never ever gets old. The beach itself is a geology lesson where all sorts of rock types and formations are found. Some are there because of glacial movement; others formed from weathering and erosion. 

In tide pools, purple sea urchins live in hollowed out sandstone, in perfect circles that fit the urchins beautifully. Granite and sandstone, igneous and metamorphic rock combine to make this a truly diverse environment.

Tim spotted this bird crouched on a rock among the millions of mussels on the beach, just resting. After checking our bird book, we are pretty sure it's a long-distance migrant American Golden Plover en route to the high Arctic where it breeds. It winters in southern South America, so it has traveled a very long ways and deserves a good rest. 

Here's yours truly on the beach changing camera lenses. 

Each time we visit this beach I find something new to enchant me. This time it was a tide pool where limpets lie like scattered and intricate gold coins on richly coloured velvet lichens. We crouched low and watched the action in this one pool for a long time. Tiny snails, ranging from 1/4 to 1 inch crawled with hairy legs in and around the limpets, doing their job of scraping algae. These pools remind me of a Klimt painting with their opulent colours and bits of gold. 

The Psalmist wrote "There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number - living things both large and small."