Will Pacific Coast HWY Survive the Winter?

So it finally feels like winter could be coming. Been getting some rain, and we're supposed to get our first good west wind swell this afternoon, which is a sign of the seasons changing a little bit. We've had nothing but tropical swells and a bunch of south swells all year, but today it's finally changing, and what I want to do is a quick comparison of the beaches before this west wind swell and the beaches after, so... Down here at Thousand Steps I'm going to go show you how much rock and how much of the cove has been chewed up by all the south swells that we've had this summer. And then we're going to come back down tomorrow or the next day and see how much sand that west west wind swell puts back in the in the areas where the the beaches have eroded. So we'll do that with a bunch of beaches today too. This is the first spot we're checking out. So this is where a landslide was two winters ago and that is a very precarious house. Sitting right above a pretty unstable cliff if you ask me and I'm very curious what this this bluff and this cliff is going to do this winter. So as you can tell there's a lot of uh a lot of rocks down here that are getting pulled out into this to the ocean after the slide and there's a lot of just rocks exposed. Normally this is pretty sandy right here so we'll see what happens to this after the west winds well all right try a lot of you that haven't been down to this beach before but This is pretty unprecedented territory for down here. There's a bunch of downed palm trees, probably a couple more that are about to be downed, and they're just hanging on by a couple of roots, just barely. But yeah, curious to see what this looks like after some wind swell on it as well. Maybe this palm tree will be buried. In the wintertime you can walk into that cave over there. There's a cave all the way out at the point and it's kind of a very popular place to go now, maybe a little too popular. Still getting dug out right now. I'm shooting this in 0.5. Note to self, concrete ramp. Don't see that thing too often. Sand getting washed up here somehow. Can't go out there because the lifeguards are gonna yell at me. All right, here's this west wind I was talking about. It just went from zero to blowing probably 15 knots in a matter of minutes. Look at how many white tops. Whitecaps are out here. Just a sea of whitecaps. In theory. All that wind is going to blow up some some west swell and then we should have some sand coming back to places where we haven't seen it in a long time. We'll come back and check in on these places tomorrow. I'm gonna go look at Aliso, try to get a before and after of Aliso, maybe Brook Street surfing sand area, and the crack. I think there's gonna be a lot of sand coming back to the crack. So yeah, we'll go check it all out. It's actually way windier than I thought it was going to be. It is going to blow some waves in here for sure, especially if this keeps up. We're going to have some nice northwest wind swell from there. People usually tell me that I lost my brush, but we found one today. We got some sand coming back to Aliso just a couple weeks ago. This was rock right here. All rocky from standing. It was pretty cool to see the sand pushed all the way back up. All the way back up to the parking lot. Even in the parking lot, there's a lot of sand in the parking lot still. A bit of wave just washed up not that long ago into the parking lot. Pretty insane. It's not even that high of a tide. Definitely swell though. A ton of sand coming back here too. Starting to look a little bit better over here. Pier pilings are just barely sticking out. The wall is probably probably like four feet. Probably five feet. Over there is still just a rock quarry. But I think sand's going to come back today. I think there's going to be plenty more sand from the back. I made it down to Salt Creek to check up on this little fracture in the cliff right below the Ritz and see if this wind swell is going to bring any sand back down to the south end or down to the point area. I imagine it is. I mean, there's a lot of wind swell in the water now from when we left 10th Street this morning. So hopefully this will bring some sand in. Pretty much washing up. To the freaking very end of the beach. Got all of this action. Look at how, oh my gosh. The waves are really washing up far here. I think this rock might have fallen down since I was here last. Come on, look at that. Poultry's just getting smoked. Dang. Signs of sand. They're looking kind of dismal right here. So much energy concentrated into this little corner. And here's the crack we're working with up there. Still there. On to the last beaches of the day. We're heading to downtown Laguna. Probably look at Brooks. And then down to everyone's favorite pull-up spot, the crack, El Morro. That one actually could be a pretty interesting coke. I'm thinking that there's going to be a lot of sand that moves in front of the trap bags after all this wind swell that we get, which would be great for further making a buffer for waves to wash up. So, yeah, we'll go scout that out today. Go back tomorrow and see if a bunch of sand moved over there. Got some pretty cool stuff happening down at El Morro today. This west wind swell appears to be depositing some sand over there in front of the crack, the infamous crack. So you're able to see some sediment in the water that was getting transported from north to south and there was a pretty good rip current that was stacking up right on the point there. And you can just see where the water is kind of brown, and that's where all the sand and sediment from further north is going. So hopefully there's a nice little buffer of beach that is going to be deposited after all this west wind and west wind swell. It's north, I guess, northwest wind swell. It does seem like the crack is a little bit larger than it has been. You kind of see it through. through the tarps that they put over it that they were using to prevent rain from getting on it but you can definitely tell that the crack is at least a foot foot lower than it was or just it just is bigger for sure um the the trap bags seem to be really doing their job on the south end of the bluff those things are fully blocking the waves from hitting the hitting the bottom of the cliff And then on the north end of the cliff, they still haven't put all the trap bags yet. And there's a bunch of waves that are getting close to hitting the bottom of the cliff. But it seems like they placed a bunch of boulders or maybe even the swell moved the boulders over to that little zone. But yeah, there's quite a... Good amount of waves today. There's south swell in the water on top of the north northwest wind swell so waves were definitely washing up to the base of that thing. The tide was pretty high when we were looking at it and yeah it looks like looks like all in all things are holding up pretty good over there especially considering how how much swell we have and tides are not are not exactly mellow right now like there's still a five foot high tide at the peak high and With the kelvin wave that's more like a six and a half foot or 6.2 foot high tide so waves are definitely still washing up to the base and all things considered that project seems to be holding up super well so it will be fascinating to see what happens at the end of the month when we have those king tides again on the 24th I think it's like the 24th through the 26th. If we have any swell paired with that, it's going to be very interesting to see how far waves can wash up to the base of that sea cliff. And hopefully they finish trap bagging and the whole thing by then. That's a wrap for the crack. So when you fail, you have no signs of sand yet. God. You were. Dude, this is gnarly in here. Brook Street. Sea misting. I guess we might get a victory at sea out here. A whole victory at sea. Mountain. little bit of sand right here we're going down into the sketchy zone huh kind of some sand uh surface i got a window blown out today that board was not there before man we might have got some road blown out today too i don't know if that i think we're missing some concrete down there there is some concrete right there that might have happened today look at concrete chunks right there and there's another concrete chunk right there Almost 100% sure that there was more pavement that just got blown off the end of the Bluebird Canyon Road right where it meets the water. There was definitely more concrete here just the other day. I thought this was going to be the last stop of the day, but I'm actually pretty curious how that ramp is holding up at the montage. I know that they had a lot of erosion there just a week ago. That'll be our last spot we check. Today's got me thinking a little bit. Where's the damn sand? Sandman took it away and it doesn't appear to be coming back in some places. I think El Morro was the first beach that I've seen where you can tell that there's more sand filling back in right along the shore. The rest of Laguna, not so much. Really was looking pretty dismal at Thalia, Oak, Brooks, Surf and Sand. Thought there would be a little bit more but then again this is just the first few hours of this west wind blowing so hopefully overnight that west wind starts to move some sand over into those places where it hasn't been in a while. But it kind of just looks like this kelvin wave and the extra sea level that we have right now is trying to push the shoreline higher and there's nowhere Nowhere for it to go in a lot of places like Aliso or like Brooks. It's just all rock up there. And there's nothing maybe for the sand to really grab on to or the rocks. When it hits the rocks, it's just bouncing off of it and going back out to sea. That's my theory. I really am not so sure. But we're checking out a lot of waves breaking in here, too. Waves are splashing all the way over here, all the way in the middle of the beach from over there. Here we go. Wow. There's a little river taking sand away from the beach right here down this way. full river oh oh i just got pretty freaking splash done here goes the river risky business right here wow yeah look at all this all up there all right we're getting out of here before set comes get the hell out of here don't do that pretty good sunset spot that's a wrap for the november 1st spicoli news and surf report thank you all for watching I think we're going to have some more days of waves ahead and definitely stay tuned for those king tides at the end of the month. Hopefully our coast doesn't lose any more ground before then.