We discovered by the end of our trip that sometimes the really cool stuff is badly advertised, or hard to find information on. Glass Beach is a prime example of this. If I hadn’t heard about it in a National Geographic Kids magazine several years previously, we would have driven right by on our way north from Mendicino. Fort Bragg, CA used the beach, at that time as plain and ordinary as beaches come, as a dump from the forties all the way until 1967 when the state water control board closed the it for this purpose. Several cleanup efforts were made, removing the largest pieces of garbage, like broken-down cars and kitchen appliances, but they couldn’t get everything. The tides eventually broke down what was left, until the beach itself was made up of weathered glass and tumbled scraps of metal.

There are two beaches open to the public, on state park property. One is labeled easy to get to, the other difficult. It isn’t so hard really, if you can manage a flight of stairs without a handrail you should be fine. The harder to acsess beach is much more isolated from people and the full force of the Pacific Ocean, and so is much more impressive. Mostly made up of white, brown, and green glass, scattered with the occasional blue, the rare red, pieces of pottery, and scraps of metal, it’s best visited when the tide is low. Though its shine is somewhat muted by the milky exterior and sanded texture, the glass within a few inches of the shore that is wetted by each small wave will glitter in the sun. They tell you not to take any glass, for fear of depleting the beach, but I wasn’t arrested for keeping a small handful.