Somewhere not far from Fort Bragg, you can find a unique place, Glass Beach, a beach where nature has turned the mockery of the locals into a real miracle, grinding for decades all the pieces of glass thrown here until they have turned into multicolored pebbles that give the beach a wonderful look, unique both in California and anywhere else in the world.
As in many other parts of the world, the early twentieth century caught Fort Bragg area in full ascension. California was the ideal place if you wanted a job, you liked the heat and especially if you wanted to start a house and a family. It’s just that not everyone understood what the notion of ecology meant…
So most Fort Bragg residents dumped their waste in an area owned by the Union Lumber Company, about where Glass Beach is now. Here you could find almost any kind of garbage from broken bottles to clothes, appliances and even cars.
The tradition of dumping land continued on Glass Beach until the late 1960s. Thus, in 1967, the area came to the attention of the California State Department of Water Control. And the first step taken by this agency was to close the whole area while waiting for the cleaning measures of all the waste stored here. This happened over several decades in the following years, during which several greening campaigns and the incessant action of the waves led to the disposal of most of the garbage.
What was left behind was much more interesting, because neither the volunteers nor the water managed to recover the glass scraps from the beach. But nature had a secret plan for this problem. Under the action of ebb and flow, the bottles and ceramics were broken into tiny pieces and over time, the shards were rounded to perfection, so that today the beach is full of small pebbles of colored glass.
Meanwhile, in the late ’90s, the private owner of the beach decided that it should be reintroduced into the public circuit because of its beauty and uniqueness. Therefore, Glass Beach entered a five-year process in which the area was completely greened and the state bought it and included it in the patrimony of MacKerricher State Park. In this way, the area could be opened to all visitors, who finally had official access to this place. Not to mention that before long there were enough people jumping the fence, but that’s another story.
Today, Glass Beach has become an important tourist attraction, but despite the abundance of glass pebbles, collectors are discouraged from collecting them. However, not a few leave with a souvenir, this being one of the reasons why, little by little, the beach seems to lose exactly those little pieces of colored glass that gave it its name.
