![]() It’s great in (almost) any weather – just don’t forget to check the tide tables before you go! While the picnic area isn’t a big draw in the winter, it’s a great spot for picnics or outdoor games in good weather. The kids happily spent a few hours at Meadowdale Beach playing with rocks and sticks and splashing at the water’s edge. A clear day provides fantastic views of the Olympic Mountains. This is a great easy year-round hike in the North Seattle/Snohomish County urban area, with a wonderful beach to explore during low tide. The beach is sometimes inaccessible during high tides, so check the tide tables ahead of time if you’re hoping for beach time. The trail can be muddy if it’s been raining. ![]() Dogs on leash are welcome, including on the beach. ![]() This is a great place for tossing a ball or Frisbee. Along the trail, just before the beach, is a large grassy area with picnic tables, a covered picnic shelter, and restrooms (or port-a-potties on our visit). A port-a-potty is stationed in the parking lot. Fortunately, street parking is available nearby. Parking at Meadowdale Beach Park is free, but on busy weekends it can fill. Current trip reports are available online on the WTA (Washington Trails Association) website. This hike is included in the book Best Hikes with Kids: Western Washington by Susan Elderkin. January, 2021, about 3 hours, but that included almost 2 hours at the beach CURRENT INFO The first part of the trail heads downhill at a relatively gentle slope (there are some stairs), then flattens out when you reach the creek at the bottom of the gulch. The Lunds Gulch Trail to Meadowdale Beach is wide and well-maintained. So that's the reason - it's because the water having little place to go and being funnelled from a massive ocean into a relatively narrow section of the earth's surface and, if you have a lot of water entering a small area, you're going to get a very radical tide height change.Meadowdale Beach Park is located a short distance north of Seattle in Lynnwood, Washington, on the shores of Puget Sound. In some places, when I was in Australia last year, I went to somewhere where some of the highest tropical tides are, in Northwestern Australia, up where the horizontal falls are, and it's between 10 and 13 metres the tide there. All of the incoming tide gets funnelled into a very small part of the estuary which heaps up the water there, drives a lot of water inland very fast and then it comes out again, and that's you get these very big tides. ![]() You've got the patch of the coastline of Wales and the north of Devon and Cornwall which narrows in like a funnel to a very narrow patch of coast. The earth then turns through that bulge, which effectively moves across the surface of the earth and it's going to interact with land masses. So if you have a certain coastal configuration that means that the water all heaps up in one place because it's got nowhere to go, you're going to see a bigger tide there than if the water can distribute and flatten out easily.Ī really good example of this is the Severn Estuary in the Bristol Channel. The reason water moves around the earth is because the earth is spinning inside the orbit of the moon, the moon is gravitationally attracting the bulge of water towards itself on the side of the earth closest to the moon, and there's also another bulge on the opposite side of the earth.
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