We had some glorious springlike weather today in Hoquiam; I just had to get out for a walk along the Grays Harbor bay.
For some reason, I rarely get out there at low tide, so I have few photos with the mudflat exposed as it is here. I also have never before noticed the erosion at the base of this abandoned dock piling.
Hoquiam is littered with dock pilings like this. They're scattered along the bay; they line both sides of the river all the way through town; there's even a line of them across the bay along Rennie Island, where the near trees in this photo grow.
Rennie Island isn't used by the port in the present day, but I guess at some point they were offloading boats there.
But they were offloading boats everywhere back in the day. I've seen photos of Hoquiam from the late 1800s and early 1900s -- every inch of shoreline was covered with wooden docks; it was basically a miles-long boardwalk around all the water.
I don't know when they removed all of that, or when they stopped maintaining it, so it's hard to tell how long this dock piling has been standing. It's kind of fun to imagine that the water has been slowly eating away at that post for over one hundred years, and to think about how many people have passed by it.
I'm glad they removed that boardwalk along the water -- it's much more beautiful with a natural shoreline. The dock pilings, though, add a bit of romanticism to the scene, so most of the time I don't mind them.
I took about 160 photos on my walk along the bay, definitely enough for a full-length post in the near future.
Stay tuned!
You can view the full post of this walk, with 12 more photos, here.