Point Grenville
Point Grenville is a headland of Washington state, located on the central portion of the Olympic Peninsula, between Taholah to the north and Moclips to the south. One of the major promontories on the Washington coast, it is in the Quinault Indian Nation, with the community of Santiago nearby. The area is part of the Copalis National Wildlife Refuge and the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary. Since 2013, it has been called Point Haynisisoos by the Quinault Nation.
It was the site of the first European landing in what would become Washington state, during Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra's expedition in 1775.
Geography
The cliffs at Point Grenville are 120 feet high and numerous sea stacks composed of volcanic rock protrude in the water surrounding the headlands, sometimes called "volcanic breccia". The feature is dominated by consolidated bedrock, with both sandy beaches and boulder fields in the vicinity. Deep cracks and folds create an uneven, pockmarked terrain. Offshore is the prominent Grenville Arch. Fossils found in the siltstone beds formed from the ancient ocean floor suggest that they date to 45 to 50 million years ago, some of the oldest found on the Washington coast.On top of the point, the ground slopes seaward, as the headland formed from a larger seaward outcropping that eroded 17,000 or more years ago. At its maximum extent the headland likely extended several miles west into the Pacific Ocean. Piddocks, a tidal species of bivalve mollusc, have formed borings in the uplifted bedrock surface.
To the south, the point creates a sheltered bay, called Grenville Bay, and along the shore a long, sandy headland-bay beach, also called a logarithmic spiral beach, extends for about four miles. The beach is typically called Point Grenville Beach south to the mouth of the Moclips River. The promontory serves as a dividing point on the Washington coast between the rocky coastline to the north and the sandier, wider beaches and spits south of the point.
History
Prior to European contact, the point and the area around it were inhabited by the Quinault people. There were a variety of names for the headland in the Quinault language referring to its geographic features, including a’tsak, meaning "Inside Point" and o’lamix ci’tks, meaning "Soft Sand Point". The site is significant to the Quinault people as a useful lookout and a sacred location for spiritual practices and rites of passage.On July 12, 1775, the expedition of Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra and Bruno de Heceta anchored the Santiago and Sonora near Grenville Bay with some difficulty, owing to the many underwater shoals in the shallows. They sent a large party ashore, becoming the first Europeans to set foot on what is now Washington state. Heceta and Benito de la Sierra, a Catholic priest, performed a ceremony claiming the land for the Kingdom of Spain, specifically Nueva Galicia, the Spanish designation for the Pacific Northwest at the time. Heceta named their landing spot Rada de Bucareli, or Bucareli Cove, in honor of the Viceroy of New Spain at the time, Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa. The next day, a smaller party came ashore to resupply. Quadra reports that this smaller party of six men was attacked by a group of several hundred Quinaults who killed four and wounded the other two such that they succumbed to their injuries while swimming back to the ships. More of the local Quinault then surrounded the ships in canoes as they made an effort to depart through the shoals of the bay. Quadra called the spot Punta de los Mártires after the Spanish sailors killed in the Quinault attack. In November 1989, the state of Washington placed a historical marker at Point Grenville in recognition of the state's centennial and the first Europeans to reach its shores.
The 1791-1795 expedition of George Vancouver passed by on April 28, 1792. Vancouver listed the promontory as Point Grenville on his charts after William Wyndham Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville, then Secretary of State of the United Kingdom and a close personal friend of his. Vancouver published a profile engraving of the point, created by draughtsman Benjamin Thomas Pouncy in his work recollecting the expedition, A Voyage of Discovery. In the 19th century and into the early 20th, there was some variation in the spelling and name, with variants including "Granville" and "Grennville Point". In 2013, the Quinault Nation renamed the headland to Point Haynisisoos, meaning “thundering elk" in Quinault, after tribal elder Phillip E. Martin, who was known by that name. He was an advocate for the point's preservation and significance to the tribe.
A fire lookout tower called Point Grenville Lookout was established up the windward slope to the east of the point at some point prior to 1930, when an access road was constructed. In the 1953, the structure was described as a 77 foot steel tower steel structure with 4 steel legs, but by 1962 the Washington State Highway Commission reported that it was abandoned and in disrepair. As of 2020, the structure is no longer extant, though there are still footings and rotted wood present where it once stood.
Grenville Bay has been the site of many shipwrecks over the years, largely as a result of the same shoals noted by Bodega y Quadea and Heceta in 1775. Notable wrecks near the point include the lumber-laden Decatur, the French vessel Lilly Grace, the fishing trawler Tahoe, and the SS Seagate.
Beginning in June 1945, a United States Coast Guard LORAN-A hyperbolic radio station for offshore navigation was located at the point. It began as a Mobile Unit, but permanent buildings were erected in 1946, and re-constructed in 1954. The first pulse recurrence rates were 2H4, paired with Cape Blanco, Oregon and 2H5, paired with Spring Island, British Columbia but in 1971 these were changed to broadcast at 1L0 and 1L1, respectively. The Coast Guard station was also home to a NOAA Cooperative Observer Program site beginning in 1948. The first lighthouse at the point, Point Grenville Light, was erected in 1967. In 1919, the point was listed as "reserved for lighthouse purposes" on a plat map, but no lighthouse was built at that time. After a reduction in scale at the LORAN station beginning in 1976, operations fully ceased in December 1979, and the station was officially disestablished in March 1980. The light was automated from that point on. At its peak in 1948, the station was home to one commissioned officer and 19 enlisted personnel.
The 1974 film McQ, starring John Wayne, and the 1995 film Born to Be Wild were both shot in part at Point Grenville.
Ecology
Point Grenville is an intertidal study site for the Multi-Agency Rocky Intertidal Network, and the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary has conducted Long-Term Monitoring Surveys there since 2008. Target aquatic species include common acorn barnacles, California mussels, surfgrass, and Ochre stars. It is also home to large Sitka spruce trees.Copalis National Wildlife Refuge, which includes the outlying rocks of Point Grenville, was one of the earliest National Wildlife Refuges, having been created alongside Flattery Rocks National Wildlife Refuge and Quillayute Needles National Wildlife Refuge by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. The vulnerable population of seabirds that nest in the area that are of particular ecological concern, including migrating Caspian terns and sooty shearwaters during fall and spring migrations. In the summer breeding period the outlying rocks and coastal bluffs are nested by black oystercatchers, common murres, and tufted puffins.
The beach was the site of several sea otter derricks, tall structures on which sharpshooters stood to hunt otters for their fur, until the fur trade was outlawed in 1911. On July 31, 1969, 29 sea otters were translocated from Amchitka Island to Washington, and released at Point Grenville. The translocated population, including 30 released at La Push in 1970, is estimated to have declined to between 10 and 43 individuals before increasing, reaching 208 individuals in 1989. As of 2017, the population was estimated at over 2,000 individuals, and their range extends from Point Grenville in the south to Cape Flattery in the north and east to Pillar Point along the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
The Pacific razor clam, which lives in the sands of Point Grenville Beach, is a particularly important resource for the local Quinault Nation for both culinary and commercial use. The clams are harvested by tribal members under the supervision of the Quinault Department of Fisheries. Quality of the clam crop began to decline in the early 2000s due to hypoxia, or low oxygen conditions, resulting from upwells of deep sea water. The Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary works with the Quinault Nation to aid in the conservation of razor clams and facilitate their sustainable harvest.
Tourism
The point is home to the tribal access-only Haynisisoos Park on the site of the former LORAN station, which now features a totem pole carved from an 800-year-old Western red cedar, dedicated to Emmett Oliver, a Quinault Tribal Elder. It served as the terminus for the Paddle to Quinault event in 2013, part of the annual Tribal Canoe Journey. This event saw nearly 15,000 people gather at the point to watch the arrival of 89 canoes, representing around 100 Northwest tribes and Canadian First Nations, as well as native Hawaiian and Māori groups.Point Grenville has been a tourist attraction since at least the early twentieth century. Automobile tours to the point and Taholah were available to visitors at nearby beaches in the area in the 1910s. Historic Washington state outdoors club The Mountaineers began visiting around the 1920s. It has been featured on postcards since the 1910s, first with illustrations and later with photographs, including images of surfers on the beach around 1963. Prior to the late 1960s, the beach at Point Grenville was a popular surfing and recreation destination with the general public. Surfers first noted its consistent surf in the 1940s and 1950s, with its popularity booming by 1960. In 1970, it was featured on a post card for the last time, published by the Smith-Western Company in Tacoma, Washington. Issues with littering and defacement of the area, including graffiti on the rocks and the destruction of clam beds, led to the closure of the beach to the public in 1969. Until 2012, the beach was still accessible to the public with a tribal pass, but this was further restricted to preserve the ecology of the coastline. Accompaniment by an enrolled member of the Quinault Nation is now required for access to both the beach and point. The 1969 decision was upheld by the Washington State Office of the Attorney General in 1970, despite a long-held customary use rule regarding access to ocean beaches in Washington State, on the basis of an 1873 Executive Order by President Ulysses S. Grant that withdrew the reservation’s lands from the public domain.