It is a changed world out there after the winter storms of the last month or so. Many of us have seen the pictures and videos but to stand in these places and see and feel the devastation is almost more than a soul can bear….
To be fair, some of these breaks will heal themselves but some will not. Some dunes will replenish over time but others will flatten out even more. Some of this process is natural and some has been exacerbated by overuse and abuse by oversand vehicles and people ignoring signs to stay off dunes and cliffs. Even the smallest foot path in a dune can become a major sand blowout if the wind is right….or wrong….
We took a long tour the other day and these are some of the highlights–or lowlights, really…
From Gray’s Beach in YarmouthPort we could see the big break in the dunes across the way at Chapin Beach in Dennis
Corporation Beach in Dennis took a big hit…
There were plenty of birds like these brant there, taking in the view and feeding…
Beaches like Paine’s Creek in Brewster are really suffering…
Changes at Nauset Beach in Orleans are unbelievable…
Yeah, there used to be dunes there….some of the dunes are now in the parking lot and filling in the stairways….
At Coast Guard Beach, the beach was actually closed to keep the dunes at the entrance to the walkway from further eroding….
This view of a flooded Nauset Marsh was taken several hours AFTER high tide….
At Nauset Light Beach the cliffs are severely compromised and again, access to the beach was shut off…
The break at Ballston Beach in Truro has been well documented but was still shocking to see first hand…
Several homes there are quite compromised….
By the time we got to Race Point in Provincetown we thought we had seen it all….but we were not prepared for this…
So much sand had blown into the parking lots there that it had been plowed into huge dunes….that dwarfed what was left of the dunes it blew away from!
And there was the cause of it all….looking much calmer but still a little worked up…
it was a long, emotional day….
