Our friend Shilpa made us aware of the beautifully-bejeweled Glass Beach of Fort Bragg, California. From Unfinished Man:
Glass Beach is a protected part of MacKerricher State Park, but in 1949, it was the site of an unrestricted dump. For 18 years, people drove out to the scenic expanse of ocean
Close-up view of the colored glass beads mixed in the sand at Glass Beach near Fort Bragg, CA (glassbeach36xy) (Photo credit: mlhradio)
cliffs, marveled at the beauty of the natural world and the majesty of the depths, and then threw all their shit in.
Eventually, California realized that dumping automobiles, appliances, toxic substances and razor sharp shards of glass into the water was probably a bad idea, and looked elsewhere for a dumping site. […]Despite our obviously brilliant handling of the situation, Mother Earth had a few tricks up her sleeve, and spent the next 30 years tumbling away the jagged edges of our insensitivity and leaving behind brilliant pebbles of polished glass. As the shores grew into glimmering beaches, the state realized that people were visiting to collect the glass and to see the rainbow sands reflecting the sun, and quickly annexed it into a national park. The result? We finished up what nature graciously started, spent a few years cleaning up rusting metal hulks and all sorts of wonderfully dangerous debris (nothing says sandcastle fun like getting tetanus from a lead-filled 50s throwback), and Glass Beach is now a protected treasure that I’m dying to visit.
Check out more pics here.
