Surprise, Beach!

Surprise Beach

The beach known, quite possibly only to Google Maps, as Surprise Beach made its first appearance of the year just in time for the Summer Solstice. You can just see the slightest sliver of it above. (If you look up Surprise Beach on Google Maps, you can see at least one photo of what the beach usually looks like.)

As the river returned one beach, it took away from another. Just recently, the river claimed a sign belonging to Beaches Restaurant which is just out of frame, upstream from the above image.For 22 years, the sign stood atop a group of pilings outside the restaurant, about 150 steps from my front door. We used it as an unofficial depth gauge to see how high the river was. I don't know how high the river was when the photo (found at link) was taken. At its high, the river reached the bottom of the phone.

Osprey perch and nest.

The river also threatened to take these two pilings which are currently home to a pair of nesting osprey. (You have to zoom in real close to see an osprey on one piling. The nest is barely visible on the other.) They wobbled and swayed at the higher depths and currents. The pilings remain but a horizontal perch that was just atop the nest is now missing.

The river is down about 7 feet from it's high of 17+ in March. If you scroll back through some of my posts (here, for example), you can see that the river was up over the sidewalk (a short distance downriver from where these photos were taken). 

Floating rock.

If you zoom in real close on this other image you will see a rock near the base of another piling. (All three images were taken from the same vantage point.) We are confounded by the fact that this rock looks exactly the same as when the river was 7 feet higher. We walk by this point every day. This photo was taken yesterday but the rock looked exactly the same in March. We can come to no other conclusion than this rock floats.

That's biggest surprise of them all.