Getting muddy. Or not.

Along the highway leading into the Boundary Bay beach area, a sign warns of extreme high tides.  (Checking the tide tables, I see what they mean; across the bay from us, high tide was 13 feet. On the other side of the peninsula, it was just under 16 feet. That means the water comes right up to the walls that protect the community's back yards.)

We were lucky, though; we stopped at the inner end, the Mud Bay end, but we got there as the tide was going out.

Looks good. But it's slippery, soggy, mushy, sticky mud. Goopy mud.

Logs, mud, and watery mud.

Did I mention that we were on the Mud Bay end? Until it's been dry for a while, you can't walk there without good boots. Unless you're a horse with big, floppy feet:

Splash, splosh, plop.

Hope they like being groomed. They're going to need it.

My boots are in the bathtub, getting dry enough to clean. At least they're waterproof up to the zipper at the ankle. Laurie's shoes were not.

But the view was worth it.

Mount Baker, from a back yard. Not ours, unfortunately.

North Shore mountains, with a flight of sandpipers.

We brought home a few pale pink macoma clam shells* that had been tossed up alongside the walls. In one of them, I found a tiny flatworm (1/4 inch long), the palest, cleanest, almost transparent green; its miniature ruffled pharynx gleams whitely from its middle. How it stays that clean in sticky mud is a mystery.

*I didn't know this about macomas:

"Macomas are mud-dwelling clams which differ from most other bivalves in their mode of feeding. Most clams are filter-feeders. They draw water into a siphon, filter out nutrients and exhale the filtered water through another siphon. Macomas are deposit feeders. The inhalent siphon is very long and and sweeps over the mud, acting like a vacuum cleaner." From MBL (Woods Hole)