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For as long as David Cottrell could remember, his hometown had been falling into the sea. In the early 1960s, when Cottrell was 3 years old, an abandoned US Coast Guard station teetered over the water of the Pacific in North Cove, Washington. By the middle of the decade, the station was gone—as was a post office, a schoolhouse, and one of the state’s earliest lighthouses.
As North Cove’s buildings melted into the ocean, many of the town’s residents melted away too, loading their wooden homes onto trucks and retreating inland. With every boom and crash of the tide, those who remained were reminded that it was only a matter of time before their homes fell too.
Still, there was a life to be made here. For the next 55 years, Cottrell would work on one of 70 family farms that together provided 60 percent of the state’s cranberries on the 800 acres of boggy land found just inland from North Cove, behind Highway 105. The highway provided a vital transport link and served as a natural dyke, but like the land around it, its future was precarious; Highway 105 had already been moved once due to rising water, in 1995, and a 2015 estimate from the Washington State Department of Ecology suggested even in its new location it would be underwater by 2030. A seawall to hold back the ocean would cost tens of millions of dollars.
With his livelihood and community teetering on the edge, Cottrell felt he had “nothing to lose.” One day in 2016 he walked to the end of North Cove’s main ocean-facing road, Blue Pacific Drive—its end a mess of crumpled tarmac culminating in a 14-foot drop into the ocean—and dumped $400 worth of basalt cobble over the edge in a last-ditch effort to fight against erosion. Against the odds, it worked. Where once there was only churning ocean, seven years later there is new beach, complete with dune grass, driftwood, and a thriving ecosystem.
Cottrell’s success sparked a grassroots movement, with people of the local Native American Shoalwater Bay Tribe, citizen volunteers, and members of the local drainage district uniting to form an action group to work on beach-restoration projects along 2 miles of nearby coastline. For George Kaminsky, a coastal engineer at the State Department of Ecology, Cottrell’s work may have revolutionized the field. “He never tried to take credit for it,” he says, “but David contributed this thing of immense benefit, basically saving the community.”
Founded in 1884, North Cove sits nestled behind Cape Shoalwater, an ever-shrinking spit of land curling into the north end of Willapa Bay. Here, a perfect storm of conditions has turned it into the fastest eroding coastline on the West Coast of the US, earning it the moniker “Washaway Beach.”
While global warming is blamed for rapidly rising sea levels and coastal erosion worldwide, Kaminsky says the loss of Cape Shoalwater and the retreat of the North Cove shoreline is attributed to a number of complex coastal processes. El Niño-driven storms and tidal currents play a role, but Kaminsky and his colleagues believe the issue has been exacerbated by a number of nearby jetties as well as dams built along the Columbia River to the south.
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Waves carry loose sediment along a shoreline, sometimes delivering it to a beach, sometimes taking it away. Rivers feeding into the ocean then replenish the lost material. Where there are fewer building blocks available—for instance, on a coast where a nearby river is dammed or jetties trap sediment—there is less new material to keep a beach in place, and the natural rate of erosion can become supercharged.
Kaminsky also points to exotic dune grasses that have been introduced in the area, which capture “immense amounts” of wind-blown sand that would otherwise replenish the beach. Then, there’s the fact that Washington state is positioned on the edge of the North American tectonic plate, the movement of which means some areas of land are rising while others sink. “It’s the combination of all of these things that keep notching it up,” says Kaminsky of the erosion.
North Cove is unique, Kaminsky explains, in that erosion has been occurring on a massive scale for over a century. Around 100 feet of land has been lost each year. According to the Washington Coastal Hazards Resilience Network, a statewide action group, 537 parcels of land covering 2,018 acres were lost between 1984 and 2016, with a further 547 acres to follow by 2060. The first efforts to slow the tide took place in the 1950s, with well-meaning if unhelpful residents trying everything from dumping junk cars into the sea to planting huge amounts of trees in an attempt to hold the coastal soil in place. “It was the backyard version of: ‘Let’s just throw everything at it to see if we can stop it,’” says Kaminsky.
Kaminsky first met Cottrell after giving a presentation on the worsening condition of the shoreline in 2016. Cottrell was eager to hear solutions. “I was bringing the bad news, he was looking for the silver lining,” Kaminsky remembers. Cottrell had already begun his DIY stone-depositing experiments after learning that more resilient beaches further along the coast were made of volcanic basalt cobble. Kaminsky listened to Cottrell’s report of his work to date and thought it sounded promising. Together they petitioned for funding, and they were awarded $681,000 in 2018 to continue adding cobble to North Cove.
The idea of using cobble to build up dynamic revetments—or “berms”—originated with indigenous cultures, where arcing mounds of stones would be used to raise clams and trap fish. Placed strategically along a beach, these berms had the added benefit of absorbing wave energy.
But while it may have worked in the past for coastal tribes, strewing rocks along a beach isn’t the textbook approach of modern-day coastal engineers like Kaminsky. Traditionally, they favor a method known as “shoreline armoring,” which involves reinforcing a shoreline, most often with rough concrete shapes or boulders piled on a beach like Lego bricks. The other option is to build a vertical seawall.
Both methods cut off sediment resupply to the beach and, in the case of a seawall, can eventually destroy the beach entirely. “There’s so much wave energy hitting this hard structure and reflecting back into the sea that it scours away the near-shore sands, washing them away,” Kaminsky explains. Shoreline armoring projects also require a lot of expensive maintenance.
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Plus, in North Cove there’s an additional problem to handle, in that a deep offshore channel—an area where the seabed is lower—has been slowly migrating toward the cove. Where there’s deeper water, waves become more powerful. Without a beach to absorb some of their energy, these larger waves will hit the shoreline with even greater force—another argument against an armoring solution.
In comparison, cobble berms work by slowing the water as it races up the beach, with wave energy being dissipated through the act of dragging smaller rocks along. As the waves slow, sediment is dropped then held by the rocks, creating more material to hold more debris, driftwood, and plant material, offering purchase for coastal grasses. On North Cove, Cottrell set up a first berm some two-thirds up the beach, which is now entirely covered by sand. A second berm marks the top edge of the beach.
Kaminsky has been monitoring North Cove since 2018, collecting data every three months and after winter storms. He and his team study everything from beach elevation to cobble dispersal and which areas are still suffering from higher rates of erosion. Because North Cove’s shoreline is so depleted, for now it needs to be continually added to with cobbles in order to build back its strength. When new cobbles are added, Kaminsky’s studies show that very few are then washed away, though they do spread down the beach.
And by stabilizing the beach, the cobbles have served as a foundation for driftwood and dune vegetation to work together “as a natural system,” Kaminsky says. “Cobble berms are remarkably resilient and adaptable as a dynamic structure,” he says. “The great thing is, they change with nature as nature changes.”
Cottrell—who died in July 2023 after complications from a bicycle accident—would also send Kaminsky frequent field observations. Armed with a long-term understanding of how North Cove is adapting, Kaminsky can help its direct-action groups bolster weak spots with additional cobble. In photographs Cottrell, with a neat mustache and untamed sideburns emerging from under a trucker hat, is reminiscent of a 1970s Gene Hackman. Locals would see him scattering seed heads as he roamed the beach in his Carhaart jacket with the words “WashAway No More” painted on the back by his wife, Connie.
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Speaking to The Guardian in 2022, Cottrell likened his experiment to keeping a pet dragon: “It can take care of itself, but you never quite want to turn your back on it.” “The people that get this [project] best are surfers and Buddhists,” Cottrell told High Country News in a later interview. “In a situation that’s in constant flux, what you want to do is position yourself to go with it,” he mused.
Because of this constant tidal flux and adaptive management of the project, Kaminsky says it’s difficult to put an exact figure on how much cobble has been used along the shoreline, and how much money has been spent to protect North Cove since 2016. But he estimates a meager average of five cubic yards of cobble per foot of shoreline, at a cost of $1.35 million—with roughly $527,000 of this being adaptive management funding from the Pacific Conservation District and $172,000 having been raised by landowners, on top of the initial $650,000 grant. Compared to the multi-million dollar projects being carried out elsewhere along the coast, he says protecting Washaway Beach has been “a phenomenal investment.”
The system isn’t just holding back erosion, it's actively regaining land from the ocean for the first time in North Cove’s history. To date approximately 11 acres of newly formed dunes have been regained along the shoreline. “When we talk about sea level rise, we talk about ‘managed retreat,’ which accepts erosion is happening, but asks how can we adapt?” Kaminsky says. “The new term I like is ‘managed advance,’ where we’re actually regaining the shoreline! It’s unprecedented. North Cove has never gained land in the last century.”
Lab modeling has even found that in the right conditions, as sea levels rise, cobbles and beach sediment can migrate inland, leading to a land elevation gain, even as horizontal space is lost, offering hope for similar projects in the future.
North Cove is not out of the woods yet. Without continual financial support, there is still a chance erosion could advance to the highway. “There's a critical need to maintain the existing project,” Kaminsky says. Still, the example set by North Cove is catching on. “I attended the International Coastal Engineering Conference in Sydney [in December 2022], and the amount of sessions on nature-based approaches was enormous—several times larger than previous conferences,” Kaminsky says. In 2024, two more beach restoration projects are planned just along the shore from North Cove. Kaminsky will also work with Oregon State University and the University of Bath, UK, in a series of lab-based experiments testing the efficacy of different types of cobble berms.
“Nature-based approaches are being accepted and adapted as we speak,” Kaminsky says. “People are liking what they see and wanting to apply it. David always insisted we’re working with nature as a process to encourage a more stable dynamic. It was a different thought process: How can we use nature-based measures to figure out a way to live more in harmony with the ever-changing shoreline?”
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