The end of the pier
Started: 2023-03-09 20:24:57
Submitted: 2023-03-09 22:01:57
Visibility: World-readable
The remains of the pier at Seacliff Beach
The first time I saw the concrete ship at Seacliff Beach was soon after we moved to Santa Cruz County in 2020. The ship was visibly falling apart in the shallow water off the beach, and a sketchy wooden pier ran all the way to the ship. The pier itself was closed, and there were a couple of temporary chain-link fences in the middle of the pier further subdividing it. (This was still early enough in the pandemic that, even though everyone ought to have known better, public health officials were still wringing their hands about opening public spaces for people to be outside, because they might accidentally get too close to someone not in their household.)
I've visited Seacliff Beach numerous times since then. Usually we park just down the beach at Rio del Mar, a cute beach neighborhood in Aptos with easy parking and an easy walk to the beach. From the beach, at the mouth of Aptos Creek, I can see the pier reaching out to the concrete ship, tucked below the sandstone cliffs framing the beach. More than once I walked out onto the pier; on one of my most recent visits I walked (carefully, barefoot on the disintegrating wooden piers, lest I get splinters in the bottom of my feet) to the end of the pier. One side of the pier was fenced off, where the state parks decided that some part of the structure was shaky and we needed to avoid it.
Many of the people on the pier were fishing into the shallow ocean, casting their lines over the edge to see what they could catch. The smell of fish hung in the air, complementing the briny aroma of the ocean, present but not overpowering. Another chain-link fence cut off the last quarter of the pier, and beyond the fence the humans fishing were replaced by brown pelicans lined up in neat rows on the railing, surveying the ocean below for their next meal. At the end of the pier a final fence tried to block my view of the ship; this part of the pier seemed like it was barely holding itself together.
The series of storms that hit California in January finally destroyed the end of the pier. While tracking the storm on social media I saw a picture of the beach with a much larger gap between the pier and the ship than I remembered, and at first I thought that the waves had moved the ship further out to sea (part of the ship's gradual disintegration) before I saw video of the wave that took out the pier. One big wave crashed into the pier from below, lifting up the deck and scattering the boards like matchsticks. Without the deck to stabilize the pilings they too fell, cast as driftwood onto the beach by the angry waves.
President Biden visited Seabright Beach in the aftermath of the storm and gave some remarks with the pier in the background, then flew past my house on his way back to Moffett Field.
In the week before President's Day, the state parks announced that they were going to have to demolish the rest of the pier, because it was falling apart and there was no credible way to rebuild enough of the pier. They staged an event on Saturday, while I was on my way to Sacramento for the weekend. I went to Seacliff Beach the next chance I got, on President's Day, the day after we returned.
From the parking lot at the top of the cliff, the damage to the pier was obvious. The back half of the pier was completely gone, while the concrete ship sat in the same place in the water, still in pieces, with its bow listing at an alarming angle and the midship bridge hosting flocks of birds. Debris from the pier was piled around the pier on both sides while the state parks tried to figure out what to do with it.
I climbed down the beach stairs and out onto the beach itself, picking my way around the driftwood littering the beach towards the high-tide line, where the waves had more recently cleared out the wood. The amount of driftwood on the beach was astounding; I was used to a couple of logs here and there, but this was piled with wood from ten-foot-long logs down to tiny twigs, all battered and smoothed by the constant motion of the waves on the beach.
I walked south along the beach to Rio del Mar and found it also covered in driftwood. Aptos Creek had formed a larger lagoon on the beach, where the waves from the ocean had pushed enough sand against the mouth of the creek so the creek had to snake around to find an outlet to the ocean.
I walked back to the pier and dropped onto the beach on the north side, heeding the warnings that the pier was not really stable enough to walk under, which seemed especially obvious since the deck under the lifeguard tower was falling over, threatening to dump the tower onto the beach below. From the side it was clear that, even where the pier remained superficially intact, the pilings underneath were not all still present and supporting the weight of the deck.
Beyond the end of the pier, past a stretch of empty ocean that used to hold the rest of the pier, the concrete ship sat, abandoned by the pier that once brought visitors to its deck.
I walked north along the beach, past the remains of a low seawall that supported a parking lot and campground. The underground structure beyond the seawall was laid bare by the force of water: in places several feet of dirt had been washed away, while in other places the pipes and culverts were exposed. A thin layer of asphalt capped the edge of the dirt behind low cliffs carved by the force of erosion. Concrete stairs and ramps remained, suspended over voids that used to hold sand and dirt.
Further up the beach, beyond the site of the campground, barely protected by a thin embankment built out of rip-rap, was a long row of (mostly) multi-million-dollar houses sitting right on the beach. The rip-rap had resisted the force of erosion but had not protected the houses behind from the force of the waves. Every house had every ground-floor window boarded up. Some had recovery and repairs underway; all of them looked like they'd need significant work to repair the damage caused by the storm.
I will miss the pier at Seacliff Beach when it's gone.
I took more pictures of Seacliff Beach the remains of the pier: Photos on 2023-02-20.
