Dungeness Spit

An Account in Five Parts

Mar 07, 2024

Names

Long known to the S’Klallam people as Tsi-tsa-kwick, the five-mile-long spit got its non-Native name in 1792. The newer name, originally New Dungeness, comes courtesy of Captain George Vancouver, who saw the spit and thought it resembled a low sandy point of land in the British Channel. Called by geologist C.J. Gilbert one of the “most remarkable shingle promontories in the world,” old Dungeness earned its name because it was the headland, or naess (Old English), at Denge. That name, in turn references a nearby marsh, known as Dengemersc, a name dating back to 774 and derived from an Old English name meaning “manured marsh.” (I can just see the marketing for Manure Marsh crabs instead of those boring Dungeness Crabs.)

Geology…of course!

Dungeness Spit is a relatively young geological feature, only about 5,000 years old. No feature dates it but instead coastal geomorphologists hypothesize the origin due to a balancing act. When the big glacier known as the Juan de Fuca lobe melted back to the north at the end of the last Ice Age, the land began to rise in response to the removal of the great weight of the massive ice sheet. This process, known as isostatic rebound, occurred relatively rapidly (inches/year) soon after the ice retreated but slowed down substantially by about 9,000 years ago. The second process was sea level rise, caused by the melting of the northern continental ice sheets, three lobes of which entered Washington, the Juan de Fuca, Puget, and Okanagon, from west to east respectively.

By about 5,000 years ago, rebound and rise had stabilized, and the agents of erosion took over. Longshore currents transported sediment eroding from the bluffs to the west and deposited them to form the spit. If you look at the sediments on the beach, what stands out, at least to geogeeks like me, is the diversity. It results from the origin of the boulders, cobbles, and pebbles from both a north flowing proto-Elwha River and south traveling glacier, particularly the latter, which could have transported the rocks tens to hundreds of miles. Those astute geomorphologists further tell us that the spit grew at an annual rate of 14.4 feet per year from 1855 to 1985. How fast it developed prior to that is unknown.

Words of Nature (a sort of light hearted, poetic take on place)

Rocks: speckled, spotted, dotted, and veined; cracked, polished, and rough; magenta, white, brown, black, and mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Birds: surf scoters with their characteristic dive plunge down in search of a meal; bald eagles perched on ancient tree limbs glancing into the wind and opening wings that seem impossibly huge; pigeon guillemots wing beating to a furious blur; gulls surfing wind waves.

Kelp: blades, stipes, tubes, bulbs, and holdfasts, the latter a multifingered clutch onto a rock. One self-avowed coast nerd has proposed that when kelp latches onto a cobble, it aids in transport and could help account for the rocks on the spit.

Logs: Bleached, beaten, tattered, delimbed, and polished; some so big I am glad I missed the storm that tossed them ashore; some so covered in bird shit I wonder if a DNA analysis would reveal the stories of avian life and death on this beach; some so long and straight I wonder if they rejoice in having escaped their urban domestication as telephone poles.

Waves: Slipping ashore, as if testing whether it’s safe. Crashing ashore, rejoicing in their power. Washing over pebbles, allowing me to hear the lithic chatter. Relentlessly coming ashore, never ceasing in the endless battle between erosion and deposition.

Wrack: A protean line of bones, carapaces, eelgrass, eggs, feathers, jellies, kelps, logs, pebbles, seaweeds, shells, and trash, tangible evidence of high tide.

Attorneys at the Beach

Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, and Derelict: Detrital evidence of things gone wrong, the first referring to items not deliberately tossed overboard, such as a shipwreck, the second to items deliberately tossed away, and the final two to sunken goods.

Lawyers: No, none that I know of on the beach but they are germane to my previous entry, as maritime law holds that flotsam can be claimed by the original owner, whereas the claimant of jetsam is one who found it. Similarly an item labeled as lagan is an item with a buoy attached, indicating ownership of said item, whereas one who finds a derelict good can claim it. Now you know what to do when you find these items.

Curiousities

Out on the spit, where so many rocks from pebbles on up in size are dark colors, the sand is white to tawny. The reason is simple. The sand consists primarily of quartz and feldspar, both of which are light colored, abundant, hard, and resistant to breakdown, unlike the darker minerals that color the rocks.

More than many landscape features, a spit is a dichotomous mix of stability and dynamism. For the past 5,000 years or so, the spit has been in roughly this location, a persistent finger of sediment and debris pointing east with the currents. But if you were to stand in one place, you’d also experience a conveyor belt of material constantly moving past you and out the spit. This movement of wood and rock would be especially noticeable during big storm cycles, the time when detritus is in motion and the spit seems anything but stabile.

One question that our friendly coastal geomorphologists cannot answer: What’s the future of Dungeness Spit? Will a rising sea submerge or cut through the spit? Will a rising sea result in additional bluff erosion that could potentially enlarge the spit? Either way, the long finger continue to be dynamic and beautiful, and one of my favorite spots in Washington.

Word of the week - shingle - Dating back to the 1500s, it refers to beach covered in rounded pebbles. Curiously, this shingle does not relate to the shingles associated with cladding a roof, and in fact, is of uncertain origin. I tend to think of shingle as more of a British term, which I encountered in reference to Arctic and Antarctic exploration, often in miserable situations such as Elephant Island on Shackleton’s famed expedition or Beechey Island and the graves from the Franklin Expedition.

And, thanks to Hugh Shipman and Ian Miller for their thoughtful answers to my questions about the life history of the spit.

March 17 - IslandWood - Bainbridge Island - 2pm - I will be talking about my co-authored book Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State.

March 23 - Village Books - Bellingham - I will be returning to Village Books as part of their partnership with the North Cascades Institute’s Nature of Writing series. I will be talking about my co-authored book Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State.