Photo: Moximox
After a year of waiting impatiently for summer, we always wanted to squeeze in every memorable summer activity we had ever done: crabbing, seining with a net, riding waves, building sand castles, walking to the Sunken Forest, digging for mole crabs, painting shells and selling them outside the house (what my father called teasingly “gypping the public”), roasting marshmallows at night. We did not want to miss one thing because we knew we’d have to wait a whole year for another chance. And in those days, a year seemed like an eternity.
One of the more iconic things I associate with summer is sea glass, and I recently was intrigued to learn from @chasonw on instagram that there was a place you could have the sea-glass experience any time of year. It’s called Glass Beach, and it’s at Fort Bragg, California. As pretty as sea glass is, you will not be surprised to learn that the abundance at Glass Beach is the result of years of dumping garbage.
From Wikipedia: “In 1906, Fort Bragg residents established an official water dump site behind the Union Lumber Company. … When [a second dump was] filled in 1949, the dump was moved north to what is now known as ‘Glass Beach,’ which remained an active dump site until 1967. …
“Over the next several decades, what was biodegradable in the dump sites simply degraded and all the metal and other items were eventually removed and sold as scrap or used in art. The pounding waves broke down the glass and pottery and tumbled those pieces into the small, smooth, colored pieces that often become jewelry quality and that cover Glass Beach and the other two glass beaches. …
Photo: Gordon Leppig & Andrea J. Pickart
Menzie’s Wallflower, an endangered species that grows at Glass Beach in California.
“About 1,000 to 1,200 tourists visit Fort Bragg’s glass beaches each day in the summer. Most collect some glass. Because of this and also because of natural factors (wave action is constantly grinding down the glass), the glass is slowly diminishing. There is currently a movement by Captain J.H. (Cass) Forrington to replenish the beaches with discarded glass.”
If you saw yesterday’s post, you know that replenishing the beach would be hard. There is a shortage of glass everywhere. Sea glass is moving into a category closer to semiprecious stones than its embryonic form as trash.
More at Wikipedia, here.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
That is also the case with Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor. It’s a beautiful park to which you can take the ferry and enjoy the beach. It was a dump and has a ton of sea glass. They ask people to leave it. Have a great week!
I have been to only one of the Boston Harbor Islands. Now I want to visit Spectacle Island.
We have huge glass jars here, full of sea glass from untold numbers of walks on the beaches of Lake Champlain. I like finding old blue and white pottery shards, too, worn by the water action.
We often kept saltwater in our sea-glass jars, to bring out the colors. Blue, green, white, and brown were most common. Red was rare but not unheard of.