Great blue heron on a glacial erratic. Photo by L. Heineman, Aug. 2025
WHIDBEY ISLAND – It’s a five minute walk to the beach from the place we’re staying on Whidbey Island. It’s a pebbly beach, not like the soft sands of Oxnard where I first met (and in one case, fell in love with) the folks around me this week. Time has lifted and moved us, depositing us in very different places from where we were when our paths first crossed in the early 1980s.
The landscape here around the Salish Sea (“Puget Sound” is the name for the lobe extending south toward Seattle, and “Saratoga Passage” for the bit of water in the picture between Whidbey and Camano islands, each a subset nested in the larger) is fundamentally glacial, carved again and again, most recently some 15,000-ish years ago by the advance and retreat of what we moderns call the Puget Lobe of the Vashon Glacier. Thousands of feet thick, it bulldozed the landscape all higgledy-piggledy, shoving boulders and rocks and gavel and sand this way and that, then dumping them as the glacier dwindled away, melting and leaving great rolling hills of gentle topography hundreds of feet (thousands? I can only see the bits above the water line) thick.
Glacial erratics, Whidbey Island, photo by John Fleck, August 2025
Down the beach on an early morning walk the day after our arrival, I was smitten by these big boulders. “Glacial erratics” is one of my favorite sciency terms. Rocks carried from one place by a glacier and deposited in another, they are storytellers, encoded with the place they came from and the place they ended up. These rocks came down from what we would today call “Canada”, though Stefan Freelan’s marvelous map shows how odd the categories created by human-drawn lines on the map are as related to the underlying landscape.
I picked up a rental bike and spent a good part of the day Saturday riding the island, which about killed my poor old guy legs. One of the joys of cycling is the visceral, physical feel you get for the landscape. This one has rollers, up and down and up and down and up and down – the glacial till is rarely flat. The joy was real, the feel for the landscape, but yowza my legs felt it the next day. Cycling the Rio Grande Valley has not left me well prepared for this style of riding. I had to figure out how to fit the bike in the rental car so I could drive to a flatter part of the island to ride.
The Salish approaching Keystone on Whidbey Island. Photo by John Fleck
Off to the east, the Keystone Ferry runs back and forth to Port Townsend on the mainland, the Olympic Peninsula. Locals look at me oddly when I share my enthusiasm for the rhythm of ferry traffic, the coming together of a group of people to act collectively to get from one place to another. Bridges have a lot of the same conceptual characteristics, but less romance. I was happy to park the bike and sit on a picnic bench, resting the old man legs (I ask so much of them!) while watching a ferry named “Salish” dock and discharge its collective humanity. There was a teenager down on the beach tossing rocks into the air and then whacking them into the water with a stick.
I first started coming to the edge of the Salish Sea in the late ‘70s. I lived in Walla Walla, in eastern Washington, and we’d drive over Snoqualmie Pass to Seattle, often, to play the sort of games energetic youngsters experimenting with their emergence into adulthood play. We’ve been coming ever since – first to revisit my youth, then to visit members of my kooky chosen family who settled on the Island. It’s been a while since we last came, and it’s nice to be back.
The octagonal house on the beach at Snakelum Point that we visited in the ‘80s is gone, replaced by a hideous mansion built to the lot lines – we had to ignore the no trespassing signs to revisit the memories. It’s been replaced as a chosen family anchor in our lives by a menagerie up in the woods with its own sawmill, to mill the boards from which the new homestead has been built. That’s the joy, and the place the glacial erratic metaphor breaks down. The boulders just sit there, but at our best we human erratics make place.
Really interesting post—!
It reminds me of William Bull’s geomorphic responses to climate change, especially when thinking about landscapes in places like New Mexico, and the greater southwest. Bull’s work showed that rivers, alluvial fans, and valley fills don’t respond to climate in a random way—they track major climate shifts, particularly those paced by Milankovitch cycles (pronouced like weird Al Yankovich).
In New Mexico, you can actually see this in the stepped sequences of stream terraces, like those along the Rio Grande or in arroyos cutting through the Basin and Range. These terraces record pulses of aggradation during wetter, glacial periods—when more sediment was supplied by increased precipitation –and incision during warmer, drier interglacial phases, when stream energy outpaced sediment input.
Bull tied these aggradation-incision cycles to the glacial-interglacial rhythm driven by Earth’s orbital variations. So, in a place like New Mexico—with its strong contrasts in climate, geology, and tectonics—you get a clear expression of how climate drives geomorphic processes over tens of thousands of years.
It’s fascinating how these landforms become climate proxies themselves. The terraces and fan surfaces across New Mexico aren’t just relics—they’re archives of climate oscillation, written in alluvium and stone. Makes you wonder how modern land use and climate change will leave their mark by comparison.
Also of interest—although not directly related to glaciation – the 1700 Cascadia earthquake and tsunami– :
….the recent tsunami generated by an offshore earthquake near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula is a powerful reminder of how interconnected the Pacific Rim truly is. Although this event caused only minor effects along the U.S. West Coast, it harkens back to another trans-Pacific disaster with profound local implications—the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake of January 26, 1700.
Unlike the recent Kamchatka event, the 1700 earthquake struck just off the coasts of present-day Oregon and Washington with an estimated magnitude of 9.0. Remarkably, Japanese records first revealed the event’s impact. Tsunami waves—arriving with no warning earthquake felt in Japan—were documented in multiple villages. These “orphan tsunamis” puzzled historians until geological evidence from the Pacific Northwest confirmed the Cascadia origin.
Along the Oregon and Washington coasts, Native oral histories describe massive flooding, shaking, and loss of life—stories that align closely with geologic evidence of land subsidence and marine sand deposits. Like the tsunami waves from Kamchatka, the 1700 event demonstrates how seismic energy unleashed in one part of the Pacific can have devastating consequences across the ocean.
John, I enjoyed your overview of the N. Whidbey Island area. You stayed just east of Coupeville and must have enjoyed Toby’s Tavern a time or two. I lived in Oak Harbor and flew jets for the Navy for 7 years ending in 1985. -Love the area and still go back to visit. Bill Hilton
Bill – My wife’s sister texted us when we were on the ferry from Port Townsend asking if we wanted to have dinner at Toby’s. We said yes. Many happy meals at Toby’s over the years.
John, thanks for yours. We stay down at Mutiny Bay and always enjoy the drive up to Coupeville and lunch Toby’s. Reversing directions, don’t miss the Saltwater Fish House and Oyster Bar down south from Coupeville in Langley, on First Street next to Primo Bistro. Excellent food and service, but can be crowded–be there when they open! // Please keep up the good work; I enjoy your articles/postings. -Bill