Public access to Coast Guard Beach, a famed Atlantic-facing swimming beach in the Cape Cod National Seashore, could be altered within 10 to 15 years due to coastal erosion, the park superintendent said. And eventually, the public beach could be gone.
The retreating bluff along the access road, which runs parallel to the ocean, has almost reached the base of a small bridge. In a single month between January and February of this year, about 20 feet of sand dune washed away.
“We likely are on a 10- to 15-year timeline for where we're going to have to do something different at that place — that the Coast Guard Beach, as people know it, is not going to be accessible in the same way,” Superintendent Jennifer Flynn said in an interview.
The bridge provides access to beach parking, shuttle service, and the National Park Service’s Nauset Coast Guard Station.
“We're trying to begin the conversation about what comes next,” she said.
Seashore staff have long tracked erosion of the actual shoreline, where the sand meets the water. Now they are also tracking the height and location of the bluffs behind the beaches.
Hotspots, like at Coast Guard Beach in Eastham, are driving decisions about park management. Flynn said the park has begun working with towns inside the National Seashore to plan what action to take once bluffs start to fail.
One task will be to determine what elements of the park are most important to the public at those locations, “so that we, as we start to plan, can try to assure that they still have opportunities for that access,” she said.
At a meeting Monday of the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Commission, Scott Rasmussen, who monitors coastal erosion for the park, described what has happened over the last two years.
The location of the now-demolished Bartlett House, which overlooked Coast Guard Beach, has lost 26 feet of bluff in the last year, he said. The house, owned by the National Park Service at 40 Ocean View Drive, was torn down in February.
Rasmussen said that over the last 40 years, Cape Cod has seen erosion rates of about four feet a year. Not every location is the same. Some places average 10 feet a year, others 12 to 30 feet a year.
“So … real eye-opener,” he said. “When we're sort of looking at these areas and thinking, ‘Hmm, 10 years, how much time do I have?’ Well, this is what's possible.”
A few areas are stable, or even adding beach through accretion of new sand. But homeowners in areas of erosion should not be banking on the often-cited average of three or four feet a year, Flynn said.
“When we're looking at built infrastructure in relation to the bluff, people say, ‘Well, there's 30 feet, so I have at least 10 years.’ And our experience is … you can't count on it,” she told the commission.
Multiple public amenities would be affected by a retreat from Coast Guard Beach.
“Nauset Coast Guard Station is iconic, but it's not just that iconic building,” Flynn said. Also at stake are the tram drop-off, bathrooms, lifeguard station, and the beach access itself.
“If you've been to Coast Guard in the last year, that beach is really darn skinny at high tide,” she said. “And so it's very realistic to think that within 10 years, that it's going to have to look differently. And we're hoping to start, you know, a conversation about, ‘What does "different" look like there?’”
In an interview afterward, Flynn said that at some point, there may be no Coast Guard Beach as we know it today.
“Potentially,” she said. “At Coast Guard in particular, when we start to step back, we start stepping back into private property.”
The National Seashore can look for places for new parking lots, drop-off sites, or bathrooms on federally owned land, “but clearly we can't plan for people's private lands,” she said. “And so, as we fall back, we are constrained by what we own, and what we have legal authority to manage.”
Also Monday, the National Seashore Advisory Commission launched a discussion of how to define the term “Cape Cod character” in the context of the park. Federal regulations say structures in the park should retain their Cape Cod character, but the term is not defined.
Commission members highlighted the park’s nature and history, and called for inclusion of Wampanoag voices in crafting a definition.
Some raised the idea that Cape Cod’s character is not monolithic, either among towns or within a single town.
Eastham representative David Crary pointed to the difference between shingled homes and the Eastham Public Library, built in the Mid-Century Modern style.
“Lots of windows,” he said of the library. “You open the door, and your chest comes out, and you look up, and if that had been built in 1940 in Eastham, the architect would have been tarred and feathered because it's not — wouldn't have been appropriate. But it is now.”
For Provincetown member Mary-Jo Avellar, the Cape must continue to evolve, alongside preservation.
“The community that I grew up in is not the community that my Portuguese ancestors arrived in,” she said.
She pointed to a 1920s cross-burning in front of Provincetown's St. Peter the Apostle Church. The church website says residents said to have connections to the Ku Klux Klan burned the cross.
“All those old Yankees were being displaced by the Portuguese,” Avellar said, later adding, “I just think that trying to keep everything the same is going to be a problem.”
The National Seashore Advisory Commission tabled the discussion of Cape Cod character until its next meeting.
The commission may not meet again until the spring. Agendas require approval by the National Park Service.
