Wednesday, October 16, 2013

THE Trip, THE Encore' :: Glass Beach, MacKerricher State Park, Fort Bragg, California

Copyright 2013, CABS for Reflections From the Fence

May 14, 2013.  I had heard of Glass Beach, saw photos, added it to my bucket list of "I just gotta see this".

NOTE:  this post is a bit graphics heavy, hope you can stay around to read and look.

Glass Beach is part of the MacKerricher State Park, there is a brief Wikipedia page, where it tells us, it "is abundant in sea glass created from years of dumping garbage into an area of coastline near the northern part of the town."

So, a lemons to lemonade, or garbage to sea glass, event.  Arriving in Fort Bragg we located a visitors center, stopped, visited, gathered information, some maps, and directions.  Back in Jolly, we head right for Glass Beach.  After locating a parking spot, we grabbed Sony, binoculars and went in search of glass beads, err sea glass.  But, first creatures gained our attention.  This lady chased these two deer cross the fields for a long time.  I will admit seeing deer mid day almost at the sea's edge was interesting, but, you would have thought she never saw a deer in her life.  I was quite tickled to stand and watch her chase them around, cell phone clicking away:


With Sony's zoom, I captured:


Down the path towards the Glass Beach I found this fellow standing on top of a rather large bush, I shared another photo of him with his bird "guard" on Flora and Fauna:


Here is Man checking out a beach nearby.  From where we were we could not gain access to it.  We are of course, studying the beach properties, is there glass down there?


Looking in the other direction, astounding beauty.


We found a way down to this part of the beach/park.  We had to shimmy down a sharp incline, and of course, later, we had to climb out.  Here is the beach composition, no sand here.  Is there really "glass" in there?


Closer, I see glass - -


Man picked a few pieces out to show me.  We did not take even so much as one glass bead home.  There were others on the beach however, that did.  One lady filled several bottles, handfuls at a time, mixed composition as you see above.  It is our opinion that the beads should be left for future visitors and that prior visitors had decimated the beach by taking out so many of the glass beads.  We were told to see large pieces of sea glass you must kayak around to private property.  We probably could have purchased a few larger pieces, there seemed to be vendors in town.  We did not.


Another view of the land forms from this small beach area. That is the same flat top type formation as in the photo above, just from a different "altitude", pretty much sea level, eh?


Man picked up a handful of the rocks and glass without picking out specific pieces to show the variety of stones, sizes, colors.


I kept trying to get a good shot of the glass on the beach, it was not easy.  This photo is cropped.


Another view of the flat topped formation, and the walls surrounding this slim path to the ocean.  The gravel/glass looks fairly nondescript, you cannot see the sea glass until you lean down or pick up a hand full.  The view is anything but nondescript!


We climbed out of the beach and wandered around a few paths available.  Tree roots, weathered, a bit of ice plant in the foreground, the surf is picking up in this area.


Believe this is a White-Crowned Sparrow, you can see another photo of one on Flora and Fauna.  The driftwood is not bad either.


Zoom:


A lone soul walking the beach, surf rolling a bit, stunning rock formations, a great end to our day trip.





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1 comment:

Michelle Goodrum said...

Onto the bucket list this place goes. This is the one section of the west coast we have not travelled-from San Fran to the Redwoods.

BTW my kids would be very excited to see the blue beach glass. It's hard to come by.