I cannot emphasize how little sun we’ve gotten for a good chunk of January. The sun actually came out today, for the first time in what seems like ages, so we braved the wind and went to the coast.
We had two insane coastal storms the week of January 7th – the worst being the one on January 13th, because that was also the astronomical high tide of the month. The whole coast of Maine was trashed. This was our first time getting out since then, so we were interested to see how our favorite parks held up.
Two Lights didn’t look too bad. The path running along the shore definitely had some backwash litter that clearly washed up from the rocks. There was a fair amount of brush down, but it also looks like they may have been doing one of their periodic clean ups of all the non-native crap that’s crept in over the years, so I don’t know how much of that was really from the storms.
Kettle Cove was a bit more sobering. These pictures won’t make much sense if you haven’t been there, but there was quite a bit washed away at this park. The first picture is the edge of a rock spit that has a broad lawn surrounded by the rocks. People usually bring lawn chairs and sit for a while in the summer. It’s not so broad anymore – the messy edge is what dropped down on this side. I’d say that spit lost half its width.
The second picture is of the boardwalk and where the bridge should be over the stream coming out onto the beach. It’s been a few weeks, so I don’t know how much got carted away, but it’s down to the pilons now. Absolutely crazy, but a good example of why you don’t build permanent structures on sand dunes.