Evidence of the past

This photo was taken near the mouth of the Eel River last week. The redwood stump is huge, the smaller, left edge is more than six feet high. It's standing in the midst of a large open area... there's a bit of coastal terrace prairie visible in the foreground, a shallow tidal marsh with pickleweed grading into invasive Spartina beyond that, and coastal dunes just visible in the background. The river is off to the right, perhaps a quarter-mile away.

We know the stump has been there a long time, and it's highly weathered. It's possible that it was deposited here during the 1964 floods which inundated most of the estuary. Redwood tends to occur a few miles inland here, so it  was probably swept down the river first from somewhere upstream.

It's a good reminder of the power of  ecological processes, in this case the floods which periodically occur on the Eel. We can restore or otherwise manipulate to whatever degree, but it's important to remember that someday the waters will once again rise, and as a result some locations will change profoundly as a result of scour or sediment deposition.