It has been a strange week here. The Pacific ocean delivered three big storms in three days, two within 8 hour of each other.Those two storms were both creatures of very low pressure resulting in the normally very high tide being 1.3 feet higher due to the low atmospheric pressure. There was a seamless transition between the storms resulting in about 30 continuous hours of very destructive winds and waves.Trees came down in droves and the super high tides washed away shorelines of all sorts, yards , bluffs and beach. I watched a 5 acre island reduced to about 3 acres in just a few hours. Today we searched for a beach that I could get to on crutches. Massive amounts of logs now line virtually all the beaches and in spots people are using pick axes to cut paths through the now vertical shore face. Packlithic cleared a path through a maze of logs on one beach and we began to explore. Most of the chiton colonys around here have been devastated in the last 5 years by the increasingly ferocious storm waves. 5 years ago you could find 50 dead chitons on the beach in a few hundred yards of beach, ripped from the bottom by storm waves and abraded enough to show the interior plates . The lined chiton , the smaller blue plated one, is quite abraded and the gumboot chiton has been abraded enough to wipe the algae colony off it's back and remove enough flesh to show the plate ends. It takes a strong stomach to take a picture of a chiton in your hand as the smell, dead or alive, is absolutely revolting. They live up to 40 years and can grow to 14 inches and a bit over 4 pounds.Strangely we started finding pieces of the local native cactus being thrown up by the surf. They are like a fingerling potato and live on open bluffs along the ocean that are at least 45 degrees in angle. They usually reside in massive colonys 150 to 250 feet above the surf but many of the bluffs were eroded back about 20 feet , enough to cause the entire bluff from bottom to top to wash away in the waves. We brought a bunch home and rinsed the salt off and will plant them in pots . The jade preform was from a piece just that size , a nice treat after a rather disturbing walk.
