SearchResearch Challenge (1/30/19): What's the story? Steel in the sand (A new series)

As you know, I often ask questions...

... about the world, about things I notice, about interesting places, people, and events that folks point out to me. 

I thought I'd try to pull together some of these observational questions into a new series on SearchResearch called "What's the story?" 

Each "What's the Story?" Challenge will be an open-ended question that asks you, the SearchResearcher, to figure out what's going on in the image. 

As I've written SRS over the years, I've discovered that almost everything is fascinating if you just dig a little bit into what's going on under the surface. 

The Challenge this week is the first in the What's the Story? series.  See if you can't figure out, what's the story behind these images. 

Recently, while walking on the beach near the Southern California town of Goleta (just north of Santa Barbara) I came across two different pieces of steel that were sticking up out of the sand.  They're about 100 meters apart, both buried vertically in the beach sand.  This struck me as odd--this was in an ecological preserve, after all--so what are they doing there? 

What's the story ... behind these two pieces of steel sticking up out of the beach sand?  

Link to the original photo (#1) - About 2.4 meters tall.

Link to the original photo (#2) - About 2m tall and 100m north of #1.

The Challenge is not just to figure out what these are ("Hey Dan, these are big pieces of steel stuck in the sand!"), but to dig into the backstory.  How did they get there?  

If you're like me, you can spend many happy hours doing background research to understand the story behind the image. 

But the perfect answer is to find how something truly interesting about the backstory, tell us what you've found (and, as always how you found it).  

I spent about 2 hours doing my research on this Challenge.  You don't have to spend nearly as long.. unless you get really interested.  It was a huge surprise to me.  

Next week I'll let you know what I found, and how I found it.  

Search on!