Glass Beach

My nirvana is Glass Beach, in Fort Bragg, California.  It was an old bottle dump and now the beach is all beach glass.  The first time I went in 1995, I was unprepared for what I found.  My automatic camera was in my jacket pocket.  It flew out of the pocket and broke on a rock but I didn't care, I was too busy stuffing my jeans pockets with glass.  I had so much glass in them that both pockets ripped out of the pants.  That trip was forevermore known as, 'The Greedy Grab at Glass Beach'.  

The second & third times I went, in 1998 and 99, I brought a baggie.  Taking gobs and gobs of it is definitely frowned upon, so I only dug for and selected extremely rare pieces.  I really didn't take that much, considering it's all beach glass.  I do kind of regret that but I was trying not to get in trouble with the locals that were there too.  And to be honest, once you're there, it's just so full of regular white, brown and green that all you want to do is look for the other colours, because you know they're there.  You don't have to settle for white, green and brown.  Now that the internet has made info and photos of this beach so easily available, more people are visiting and stripping the place by the bagful, which is also unfortunate.  There is a jewelry page I follow on Facebook that makes beach glass jewelry and they put up as a status, "Just got a fresh batch of glass shipped in from Glass Beach!" That really bummed me out. I've had photos of it posted to my Facebook wall multiple times, so people are very much aware of this once-hidden gem.

Took mom and dad there when they visited in the spring of 1999, right before I moved north to Washington.  My mom always complained that she could never find beach glass so I took her for a foolproof hunt.  My dad proved very adept at spotting red pieces.  I also collected a lot of ceramic or china shards here.

Surprisingly....or not....these are the only 3 photos I took of Glass Beach.  Maybe I was too busy digging to bother?  That's probably it.

Here are some pics of the stuff I collected at Glass Beach.  

 

Red is the rarest colour of them all.  Early glassmaking used gold to make red, so it was very expensive and people were less likely to toss red glass items in a bottle dump.  All the red I've ever found was at this beach.

I also picked up quite a few pieces of beach crockery too.  You never see that on the east coast.

While digging for glass, I also found these cool shells.