The fastest-eroding shoreline on the West Coast
North Cove earned the name Washaway. The shoreline here retreated at something like a hundred feet a year from the late 1800s onward, which made it the fastest-eroding ocean beach on the West Coast of the United States. It took the Willapa Bay lighthouse, a Coast Guard station, a lifesaving station and 640 parcels of private property — about four square miles. Then it stopped. In 2018 David Cottrell, a North Cove native, cranberry farmer and county commissioner, started organizing the community around a technique called dynamic revetment: instead of armoring the shore with a wall, you lay down cobble and let the beach behave like a beach. He worked with George Kaminsky, a coastal engineer at the state Department of Ecology. Around 46,500 cubic yards of cobble, gravel and pebble went in as berms along the backshore, with large woody structures and native planting behind them. It worked. The cobble takes the wave energy, the wood and plants hold the sand, and the dunes came back. One three-thousand-foot stretch grew sevenfold in six years and put on more than 232,000 cubic yards of sand. In 2024 the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association named North Cove one of the nation's Best Restored Beaches. Cottrell died in 2023 and did not see it. So you can still walk out and see stumps, pilings and old foundations standing in the sand where houses used to be. You can also see, a little further along, the cobble berm that stopped it.
More things to do in Westport & Grayland
Ocosta Recreation Hall · Reichenberger Farm · Tokeland · Bottle Beach State Park · Fisherman's Boardwalk · Furford Cranberry Museum