Another Winter Storm, Another Lost Staircase At Cape Cod National Seashore

Another winter storm, another damaged staircase that leads you down to Nauset Light Beach at Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. If you're keeping track, this is the fourth year in a row that the stairs were destroyed by a winter storm, according to Superintendent George Price.

"The stairs (and the bluff to which they were secured) could not withstand the one-two punch of 50 mph winds and 15+-foot waves (from last weekend's storm). The national seashore continues to seek funds for the design of stairs that can be removed for the winter, as a long-term, sustainable solution to the constant loss of stairs due to winter storms," seashore staff wrote on their Facebook page.

Access to Nauset Light Beach is not available from the parking area; however, the beach can be accessed by hiking from Coast Guard Beach, Eastham, or Marconi Beach, Wellfleet, a seashore release said, adding that the Marconi Beach stairs weathered the storm. The storm also did "substantial damage to the Herring Cove Beach north parking lot in Provincetown," officials said.

National Park Service staff will continue to consider how to make shoreline facilities resilient and sustainable. Until recent years, the stairs at Nauset Light and Marconi Beaches only had to be replaced every three or four years; now, the stairs at Nauset Light Beach have been lost every year for the past four years, according to park staff. A concept for retractable stairs, which can be removed in the winter and re-installed in late spring, has been proposed to be engineered as a more cost-efficient and sustainable method of providing access to this popular beach.

Similarly, yearly repairs to the Herring Cove Beach north parking lot have demonstrated that this 1950s-era lot is no longer a practical visitor facility. Working with the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Commission, the seashore staff has prepared a new design for the parking lot that would be sited 125 feet farther back from the shoreline, far enough to provide beach access for a projected 50-year period.

Both of these "storm-smart" infrastructure solutions have yet to be funded, but they represent adaptive responses to shoreline change challenges faced at every level of government, seashore staff said.