Alki Junkyard (Alki Beach Park)

Alki Junkyard at Alki Beach Park in West Seattle is one of Puget Sound's most eccentric and beloved dive sites—a stretch of Sound bottom where decades of accumulated urban debris, including everything from old engine blocks to appliances to the varied detritus of urban waterfront life, has been colonized by Pacific Northwest cold-water marine life to create an artificial reef of improbable charm. The junkyard character that gives the site its name reflects a history of shoreline dumping and debris accumulation that would be objectionable in any context other than the one that Puget Sound's biology has created: every piece of metal, glass, or durable material on the bottom has become habitat, and the community that has colonized the accumulated debris is the biological equivalent of any other Seattle-area dive site. The Alki Beach Park setting—one of West Seattle's most popular beaches, with views across the main channel to downtown Seattle and the Olympic Mountains—provides a dive experience embedded in the urban fabric of one of the American Pacific Northwest's most characteristic neighborhoods. The above-water scene at Alki is thoroughly urban: the Beach Drive restaurants and coffee shops, the beach volleyball courts, the cyclists and dog walkers who make Alki one of Seattle's most active outdoor social spaces. Below the surface, this urban waterfront scene translates into the Junkyard's characteristic collection of objects that the Sound has claimed and converted. The marine life at Alki Junkyard is fully consistent with Puget Sound's general biodiversity regardless of the unconventional substrate. Giant Pacific octopus—the signature species of the Pacific Northwest's dive culture—inhabit the Junkyard's available dens with the pragmatic habitat selection characteristic of an intelligent species that will use any suitable space regardless of origin. Finding a large GPO in residence behind an old engine block or within the rusted shell of an appliance is the kind of encounter that captures the Alki Junkyard's particular appeal: extraordinary wildlife in an entirely unexpected context. Plumose anemones colonize the junkyard's metal surfaces with the same density they achieve on purpose-built reef structures or natural rock—the biological colonization of hard substrate in Puget Sound is so aggressive that the nature of the underlying material matters little to the anemones, sponges, and tunicates that establish communities on any available surface. This biological indifference to substrate origin is what converts the Junkyard from an environmental problem into a functioning reef, and the dense invertebrate community that results supports the fish and mobile invertebrate populations that make the site genuinely productive wildlife diving. For Seattle-area divers who have exhausted more conventional sites, Alki Junkyard offers the particular pleasure of a site with genuine character—unpredictable, cluttered, and thoroughly alive.