- Blowers Bluff, Whidbey Island (nwgeology.wordpress.com)
This is the second installment in the series of field trips to glacial and interglacial stratigraphy on Whidbey Island. The thick stack of geologic strata at Blowers Bluff are spectacular! Here is colorful and intricately stratified sediment from Whidbey interglacial times right above the beach, overlain sequentially by the Possession glacial till and glaciomarine drift, thin Olympia interglacial deposits, Vashon advance outwash (Esperance ‘sand’), Vashon till and, at the cliff top, the Everson glaciomarine drift. However, the sequence is in places deeply eroded, with Vashon sediments sitting directly on Whidbey, or even right at beach level. Refer back to the table listing Pleistocene glacial and interglacial units on Whidbey Island.
- Waterman Rock (wa100.dnr.wa.gov)
A giant hides in the forest of Whidbey Island’s Saratoga Woods Park. It has lived there, undisturbed, for thousands of years. The giant is a rock so huge that it could not possibly have been brought there by humans. It is a glacial erratic, dropped on Whidbey Island when the great continental ice sheets of the last ice age melted and retreated. The erratic measures 38 feet high with a circumference of 155 feet, enough to equal a pile of over 100 cars! Waterman Rock was long thought to be the largest erratic in Washington, but was demoted to second place after the Lake Stevens erratic near Everett (34 feet high and 210 feet circumference) was found to be larger. It is hard to appreciate the size of this massive rock from photographs. You will need to visit the park yourself to marvel at this geologic wonder!