Google Earth image of Tamarack State Beach in Carlsbad, California. August, 2010.
Here’s a follow up to my last post about sand loss at Tamarack. The Google Earth image above is from August 2026. Now here’s how the Tamarack looked in August 2019:
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Carlsbad beach and seawall, August 2026. This shows the beach right at the end of Cherry Avenue. Photo by Ryan B. Anderson.
This photo shows the Carlsbad seawall and beach a couple weeks ago. The beach had lost a lot of sand due to recent high tides and south swells. Here’s what the sand loss looked like down on the beach:
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Photograph a sand replenishment pipe on the beach. At “Southside” beach, south of Tamarack, in June 2018.
Headland and rocks, Big Sur 1990. Taken from a lookout spot south of Alder Creek. Photo: Ryan B. Anderson.
This is the very first photograph that I remember taking in any kind of deliberate sense. I was on a road trip with my mother when I was about 15 years old, so this would have been in 1990. This was taken at a lookout spot just south of Alder Creek. I was using my mother’s Pentax ME-Super with either a 35mm or 50mm lens. This looks more like the 50mm to me. It’s not a particularly sharp image. I was hand-holding the camera and had no idea about things like shutter speed and camera shake. But, looking back, this is basically one photo that I have been basically taking over and over again for decades. Water, headland, coast. Here’s what this spot is looking like more recently, via Google maps:
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Tamarack State Beach, circa the early 1980s. This is how Tamarack looked just before the seawall was built. This photo was shot from the northern jetty at Tamarack. Image source: Carlsbad Library.
Sometimes it’s a little hard to judge sand loss at a given location. With the sand loss event at Tamarack in Carlsbad this past month, what effectively happened was the return to how the sand and beach looked before the extensive sand replenishment that started in the early 2000s. The image above, which was taken before the seawall was constructed in the late 1980s, shows the beach and parking lot. Notice that the parking lot was already protected by riprap at this time. Here’s another image from after the seawall was constructed (circa late 1980s to early 1990s):
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Here’s a photograph of the Oceanside Strand from July 2019. A lot of the shoreline south of the pier is protected by this kind of riprap.
Here’s a closer view of the sand loss and escarpment at Tamarack. August, 2026. Shifted to black and white out of habit.
Seawall at Tamarack, March 2018. Photo by Ryan B. Anderson.
I took the photograph above back in March 2018 at Tamarack. That was when the beach was full of sand after a relatively recent replenishment. I went back to the same spot during my most recent trip. I couldn’t take a photo from the same location because the sand where I was standing in 2018 was gone. Here’s what things looked like in 2026:
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Composite image of the Tamarack Beach parking lot, showing the photograph from 1959 overlaid on the photograph from 2026.
Here’s another photo from my recent trip down the Southern California. I headed down in part because my old home beach of Tamarack was in the news. Check out some of the coverage via the SF Gate here, and NBC7 here.
Long story short, high tides and large waves from a summer south swell swept a lot of sand off the beach at Tamarack. It also undermined the riprap that was protecting the parking lot. In some of the coverage, people express concern about the loss of sand from the beach. Others say that this is how the beach actually used to look years ago.
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Composite photograph showing an image from 2026 with a black and white inset from the late 1980s to early 1990s.
After Tamarack State Beach made the news for losing a bunch of it’s sand in the last couple of weeks, I managed to get down there for a few comparative photographs. The composite above shows a stretch of the seawall that’s at the end of Sycamore Avenue in Carlsbad. This one was pretty easy to relocate and photograph. I found the historical image, which dates to the late 1980s or early 1990s, via the Carlsbad Library:
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Black’s Beach on a big day back in December 2005. Taken with a Canon 10D.
Wilder Ranch, 2005.
Taken back in February 2005 at Wilder Ranch. I was using my first digital camera, which was a Canon 10D.
Cliff House, San Francisco, California by William Henry Jackson.
Here’s another spot I’d like to rephotograph up at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The photograph above was taken by William Henry Jackson between 1880 and 1910. It’s from the 1974 monograph of Jackson’s work that was edited by Beaumont Newhall and Diana E. Adkins (published by Morgan & Morgan). This is the second Cliff House, so it had to be taken after 1896.
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File this one under early modifications of the California coast. People have been finding ways to alter and modify the shoreline for a long time. Here’s an example from Pacific Grove, California. The photo above shows Lovers Point Beach in 1903, taken by Clara Sheldon Smith (via the Hathaway Collection). Notice the wooden “wharf” in the foreground. This is the second wharf, which was built in 1897 by a guy named William Hatch (see the Pacific Grove Historical Context statement). Apparently Hatch blasted rocks from the beach and cliffs to build the new wharf. The first wharf was built in 1890 but it was destroyed by storms within just a few years. This fits the general story of construction, destruction, and reconstruction up and down the coast.
Here’s another image of Lover’s Point from 1910, taken from a different direction. This was taken by M. Rieder (via USC’s Calisphere archive):
1910 photograph of Lover’s Point by M. Rieder. Here’s the description via Calisphere: “Photograph of a view of Pacific Grove, Monterey, from Lover's Point, ca.1910. Several people look onto the water at left from the rounded rocks on the right. A few boys fish while a man in a suit points towards the left. A woman in a dress and hat stands at top on the far right. A town of buildings, houses, and tree-lined streets stands on the far bank in the background.”
I was down in Pacific Grove last week and had a chance to see Lover’s Point briefly. There’s a concrete pier/boat launch structure that was added at some point after the two wharves—I need to look into those histories a bit more. I didn’t get a chance to photograph it because I was busy…chasing two kids around. I’ll have to get some photos next time we’re down that way. This is another good candidate for the coastal rephotographic project, since there’s a number of historical images to work with.
From a beach walk in December 2024. Just north of Santa Cruz at Waddell Creek.
I have been going to the tide pools and rocky shores of Asilomar for more than 30 years. This one is from the most recent trip there.
“Near the shore after leaving Oceanside.” Photograph of coastal North San Diego County from the 1880s. From the Huntington Digital Library: https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll2/id/12006/rec/7
This is a photograph from the Huntington Digital Archive that I stumbled across while I was working on a recent draft for a paper about the long-term coastal histories of California. I was searching for images of Oceanside, California, which was one of the case studies mentioned in the draft, and I found this one.
It’s from the 1880s. It’s part of a small collection of photographs that someone put together after a trip through parts of Southern California.
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Image 1: Point Sur in Big Sur, California. July 22, 2025. Photo: Ryan Anderson.
Last week I got the chance to do a little more location scouting for my coastal rephotographic project. This time I got to check out one of my favorite sites along the Big Sur Coast, which is the view of Point Sur. I have always loved this particular spot because of the many photographers who stopped and made photographs here. Brett Weston is at the top of my personal list. In fact, it’s this image, from his book Voyage of the Eye, that has always been one of my favorites.
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Image taken in May 2024.
Seawalls and other forms of armoring or ‘hard’ stabilization are common responses to shoreline loss and coastal erosion. Seawalls can last for decades, but it depends on how they are built and what kinds of forces they are up against. It’s pretty common for a lot of seawalls to fail within a relatively short period of time. This image shows a stretch of beach in Cabo Pulmo that has seen a lot of erosion and numerous attempts to stop that erosion via seawalls and riprap. This particular seawall failed about a decade ago and its remnants have been sinking into the sand ever since. It shows one of the long-term and often unintended consequences of not-so-well-planned coastal armoring.
Kyle Brown standing next to his Chevrolet truck on Highway One Big Sur, Monterey County, California, Photo by Lewis Josselyn (5x7 film negative # 71-001-BS 0180.). Source: Monterey County Historical Society.
This is a photograph of Highway One in Big Sur from 1926. It was taken by the photographer Lewis Josselyn (1883-1964), who took thousands of great images of the Monterey and Big Sur region. He was also the official photographer for the Forest Theater in Carmel-by-the-Sea. I first learned about Josselyn’s work when I met the photographer and archivist Pat Hathaway in his little shop in Monterey around 1999-2000. Hathaway had an amazing and extensive collection of historical photographs. Now that he has passed away, this collection is now housed at the Monterey County Historical Society.