Burfoot Park, Olympia, WA

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On Friday our family went to Burfoot Park near Olympia for the first time. Burfoot Park is down toward the bottom of the Puget Sound and has 50 acres of land and 1,100 feet of salwater beach frontage on Budd Inlet.

The park has with trails, picnic areas, and a play area, but we spent most of our time there down at the beach. The trail to the beach is full of gorgeous green plants and trees, and then into the opening between the trees comes the view of the beautiful water.  It's a peaceful, rocky beach where you can find sea glass, watch the seagulls, and discover sea creatures. We aren't very experienced yet at finding sea creatures, but we did find sand dollars and a jelly fish. We were sometimes surprised (and giggled!) when water squirted us from some of the holes on the beach. We were told that geoducks are responsible for that. Some of the other creatures that can be found there are crabs, star fish, and moon snails.

Though we didn't see any moon snails, I found out this morning that we did see possible signs of moon snails--empty bivalve shells with a little hole in them (moon snails eat the soft insides of bivalve mollusks after making a hole in their shell). We wondered why some of the shells has nice holes in them making them perfect to put on a string. It's not a pleasant reason to think of, but at least now we know why!

Here are some pictures we took, and I'll probably post more another day, too.

The start of the trail to the beach:

(My husband took this picture.)

(My older son took this picture.)

Looking for seaglass (and drawing in the sand):

Sea glass my older daughter found:

Sea glass my older son found:

Sea glass my younger daughter found (she sadly 

accidentally lost her pretty blue one right before we left):

My younger son showing us a piece of sea glass he found:

A live eccentric sand dollar, aka, Pacific sand dollar:

(picture taken by my older son)