My California ~ Glass Beach

My wife and I recently crossed something off our bucket list when we visited Glass Beach.

Glass Beach is part of the MacKerricher State Park in Fort Bragg, California. The beach gets its name from the smooth colorful glass pieces that you can find among the sand and pebbles. The glass starts out as bottles that break into smaller pieces and become smooth, weathered and frosted by years of tumbling in the waves and sand. Glass Beach really deserves its name, because it has the highest concentration of beach glass found anywhere in the world.

Many beaches will have the stray piece of glass that washes ashore, but Glass Beach has more because the glass was dumped there. Before 1906, residents burned their trash on their property. After the devastation of the 1906 earthquake, there was too much trash to burn at home, so it was hauled to the beach and burned, with the expectation it would wash out to sea. Well, those rocks in the first picture will give you a clue as to what happened.

From 1906 until 1967, when these beaches served as the town's dump, instead of the glass washing out to sea, it tumbled around in those rocks and stayed right where it was.

We had read that it is illegal to remove any glass from Glass Beach, but we didn't see any signs to that effect and we saw many people combing the sand looking for unusual pieces of glass beyond the common white, green and brown.

If you ever visit Fort Bragg, you'll see signs along Highway 1 for Glass Beach. There is a nice parking area and a wide path to the beach from there. It's a great place to take pictures, especially if you can time it right and catch a sunset, but unfortunately we had lots to do on the day we were there and the weather was cold. Perhaps we need to take another trip!