WEEKEND AT THE BEACH, LEWES, DELAWARE: Sun, Sand and Nature

Beach at Cape Henlopen State Park, Lewes, Delaware.

As gentle waves lapped the shore of Delaware Bay in Lewes, Delaware. gulls skwawked overhead, children flew kites and built sandcastles, and beach goers enjoyed the water and fresh air. It was Labor Day weekend and the weather was perfect. We were in Lewes for a family reunion. During our stay we took several walks on the beach and along the paths in nearby Cape Henlopen State Park. As always, we had our eye out for birds and other wildlife. Here is some of what we saw.

All along the water's edge, we watched shorebirds foraging for food. Delaware is on the Eastern Flyway of North America, followed by millions of birds on their annual migrations. 

Laughing gull (juvenile).

Semipalmated plover.

Ring-billed gull.

Besides birds, we also found the remains of both blue crabs and hermit crabs that had washed up along the shore.

Atlantic blue crab.

Hermit crabs. The long tail is called a telson. The crabs come on shore on warm summer nights to mate and lay eggs.

I wrote about hermit crabs in my book Living Fossils: Clues to the Past but had never seen them in person. I was thrilled to find them on the beach at Lewes. Horseshoe crabs have been around for a long time. "One hundred and fifty thousand years ago, a horseshoe crab crawled onto the shore of a shallow lagoon in what is now southern Germany and searched for worms and shellfish in the damp sand. Nearby, dinosaurs preyed on insects and small animals, and lizards sat in the sun. In the air, winged reptiles soared and one of the earliest birds, archaeopteryx, flapped its wings."

The dinosaurs and winged reptiles are long gone. We only know about them from their fossil remains, but horseshoe crabs are still with us, changed little from ancient times. They are living fossils. 

Jellyfish are also ancient creatures. One afternoon we found dozens of them washed up on the sand. Some were nearly ten inches in diameter. We had to be careful not to step on them. Some jellyfish can give a nasty sting, although the moon jellyfish usually does not.

Moon jellyfish (Aurelia sp.)

Cape Henlopen State Park.

We also visited Cape Henlopen State Park in Lewes, formerly a military site, and now a place for public recreation. As well as a large public beach, the park has a campground and many trails for walkers, joggers and bikers. We took a path from the parking lot at Herring Point that went through coastal woodland and tidal wetlands.

On our walk we followed well-marked level paths through the woodland and across the marsh. 

View from the bridge. The marshland seems to go on forever.

Goldenrod along the path.

We thoroughly enjoyed our three days at the beach and the chance to reune with our family and create new memories. We would love to go back someday.

On the path near our rental house over the dunes to Lewes beach.

THE HOOD TO COAST RELAY RACE (OREGON) Guest Post by Sara Kras, with Photos by Caroline Hatton

Hood to Coast Relay Race runners in Portland, Oregon.

My friend Sara Kras is a fellow children’s writer and past contributor to this blog. Our friend Caroline Hatton took the photos in this post in August 2026. Sara was in Portland visiting her daughter who lives right on the race route. Sara commented, "It was a lot of fun watching the various runners."

Appearing like a mirage in the darkness on Linn Street, Portland, Oregon, joggers, one after another, laced with neon string lights around their necks passed by. Their breath came out ragged and heavy. Staff volunteers armed with flashlights stood on the street corner by the railroad track. “Watch out for the tracks. Go to the left,” one instructed. “Good job,” said another.

Where did these joggers come from and why were they out at 10 p.m. and later?

They were part of the 44^th annual Hood to Coast Relay Race, which took place August 28 – 29, 2026.  This race is always scheduled on the last weekend of August. 

The race began at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood at 3:00 a.m. Friday, August 28, and race starts continued until around 2:00 p.m., because teams had staggered start times depending on the speed of their individual runners, to calculate their arrival at Seaside, on the Pacific Coast of Oregon, almost two hundred miles from Timberline Lodge. The teams had to arrive in Seaside no later than 9:00 p.m. Saturday, August 29, to go on record for having finished the race. 

Volunteers (in yellow reflective vests in the two above photos) worked in 4-hour shifts. Some runners were fast and laser-focused, others smiled and waved to acknowledge cheering fans, some took walking breaks. One man wore a yellow tutu over his running shorts, a woman pulled a purple helium balloon tied to the back of her shorts, and several women had brightened their faces with a little glitter.

This popular event has about 12,600 participants. These are divided into 1,050 teams comprising about 12 runners. The race route is divided into 36 legs, each averaging about 4 to 6 miles. Each runner is assigned to run specific legs.

The teams must organize two vans. Inside the vans, the teams supply necessities such as clothing, flashlights, food and drink, and pillows and light blankets so runners can rest. In addition, there are assigned sleeping and rest fields along the route for runners to sleep between their assigned relay legs.

After the race, a finish line party commences to present awards. The party continues for several days with music along with local vendors. The small town of Seaside normally has a population of about 7,000. During this event, Seaside must accommodate an additional 20,000 visitors.

No wonder this event is called “The Mother of All Relays!”

CATALINA ISLAND--26 MILES ACROSS THE SEA: Geology Field Trip, Guest Post by Paige Arnold

In August, my granddaughter Paige, a geology student at Amherst College, went on a field trip to Catalina Island. On a clear day, Catalina Island is easily visible from the Southern California coast. Yet, in the more than fifty years that I’ve lived in California I’ve never been there! I thank Paige for her excellent report!

This summer I had the opportunity to go to Catalina Island with my professor, his collaborator, and another undergraduate student to do field work relevant to my senior thesis (a year-long research project). We were there for a little under a week, and in that time I got to see some pretty cool stuff– both geology-related and otherwise!

A picture of the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center, where we stayed in dorms for the duration of the trip. We ate breakfast and dinner here, taking a sack lunch to eat in the field (unfortunately, given that sandwiches are not particularly resistant to getting crushed by rocks, they were always pretty soggy by the time we got to them). Otherwise, their food was surprisingly good and they had 24/7 coffee, exceeding my expectations for the dining situation.

For 3 of the 5 days of field work, we drove to the Catalina Airport and looked at/sampled rocks in the surrounding area. There was an airport store behind me where I took this picture, which provided great relief to us in the form of shade, cold Gatorade, and ice cream, during our lunch breaks.

The Catalina landscape is beautiful, but quite unfriendly. A lack of tall trees means no shade, and most of the plants have sharp qualities that inspire fear. Unfortunately, interesting rock outcrops don’t care about sun, spines, and spikes, and are frequently located in places surrounded by these hostile plants (don’t ask about the cactus incident).

Another obstacle between us and the outcrops was the occasional bison (small black dot above the heads in the first photo). Fourteen bison were brought to Catalina for the filming of the 1924 Western The Vanishing American, after which it was determined that removing them from the island would just be too hard, leading to their continued presence on the island today. Despite their intimidating size, they didn’t cause us any problems other than brief moments of panic at rustling sounds in the bushes.

Here is a photo of an outcrop with a couple of the rock types we were focusing on. I won’t go into too much detail, but the big picture idea is that some rocks were part of an old subducting plate, got ripped off the plate in blocks and mixed into a weaker unit of rock, then got real hot and partially melted. In this photo, we’ve inferred that the garnet and hornblende (red and black minerals) are remnants of the original rock that did not melt, while the light minerals are the remnants of melt that did not escape the rock (leucosome). What makes Catalina so special is that these rocks are at the surface (subduction zone rocks very rarely end up at the surface!), allowing us to make direct observations of rocks that were subducted rather than extrapolating from complex geochemical signatures in the corresponding ancient volcanic arc (the Peninsular Ranges).

This is what most of the blocks looked like in the field, though they could range from cat-sized to car-sized. On the rock are our sampling tools– sledgehammer, chisel, and sample bag. Geology can be a brutish science at times.

Check out these cutesy little garnets in a row above my fingers (red dots in white line)! We think these are “peritectic” garnets, meaning they formed along with melt (the white line) as the result of the breakdown of another mineral.

Another one of many beautiful views.

Before Spanish colonizers arrived, Catalina was inhabited by the Tongva, who used the local soapstone (more formally known as talc schist– part of the weaker unit of rock I mentioned earlier) to craft bowls and other cooking ware that they traded along the California coast. This was one of a few soapstone-working sites we passed by on the way to outcrops, where you can see bowls that were never finished still attached to the rock.

In this picture I’m standing on a completely different kind of rock– metamorphosed pillow basalt intruded by blueschist dikes! Despite Catalina’s geology being so varied and complex, we’d been entirely focused on one particular kind of rock up until this day, so it was nice to branch out a little bit and see something new. This picture was taken right after a swimming break in Shark Harbor, which (if you ignore the ominous name) was an amazing place to swim with clear, cool water and waves just high enough to body surf without getting tossed around.

The aforementioned cool, clear water. It made me sad to have to look up from the water and board the ferry back to the mainland, so I took this picture to remember how blue it was.