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Sea Glass Seaside - Sand City - Fort Ord California

Seaside Beach is located just north of the city of Monterey on the Monterey Bay in Northern California, USA.

This stretch of beach is also fronts Sand City and parts of Fort Ord and Marina, so you may find this beach area called by those names also.

How to Get to Seaside, California

Here is a map showing a close view of the area of Seaside.

You can see where to park and get to the beach.

This Map Full Size

Google Map for Seaside

Beach Reports from Seaside, Sand City, Fort Ord and Marina - this is a contiguous stretch of beach.

Photo opens gallery. Title opens report page.

Seaside

Seaside Beach

Found at Seaside Beach

About the Sea Glass

You will find sea glass along the Monterey Bay coastline from Seaside to Sand City for at least the next 100 years. Why?

The dunes above the beach area are full of glass from a huge old dumpsite and are eroding slowly into the sea. This ongoing process of erosion from rain and waves will gradually be depositing new glass into the surf line.

On one hand much of the glass you'll find is not very tumbled. That is from recent erosion.

On the other hand, occasional pieces are well-tumbled and very rare and, with a lot of time searching, some have found real prize-winners here.

Best Time of the Day

To find good sea glass, you MUST go at very low tide and walk north as shown in the map.

The person with arguably the most experience and a large collection from this beach is James Hailey. He uses a scooper he has made specially for this beach and has had some prize-winning finds here.

Origin of Seaside Sea Glass

There has been some discussion about where this huge glass dump originated. The following comment by a local resident is an example:

"Vintage glass and Pottery on Seaside CA beach"

by: Anonymous - Aug 19, 2013
Hello,

It is estimated nearly 90% of the seaglass found here at Seaside Beach was from the Hotel Del Monte which used a portion of the beach side site as a burn dump from the early 1900s until it closed.

Much of it has been turned over due to the beach restoration and dune erosion but there are still some finds and you can occasionally still find crockery shards with the hotel logo.

Also, the dump site was used by the old 1949s Fort Ord Stilwell Hall.

-- Local Seaside Resident

Our Response and Observations

Hi Local Seaside Resident,

You live in a very special and unusual spot for sea glass! You have provided some very interesting information and Lin and I thank you for including it.

We would love to get some more corroborating information; for example, you mention the figure of 90% of the glass being from the Hotel Del Monte?

Do you have a reference source for that?

Map of the area covered by Fort Ord, California

From what I've seen, I would assume that most of the glass came from Fort Ord itself.

At it's peak, there were 50,000 men stationed there.

The stretch of dunes that is literally filled with glass is on the old Fort Ord beachfront property (donated to the army in 1949) stretching between Sand City and Marina.

It would seem logical that the trash that was dumped on army grounds from 1949 until ??? would have been by the army and not by a private hotel.

But then again, this is just assumption on my part :-)

Any information with some references would really add to this history.

Thanks again for adding local color to this interesting subject,

~ comment by David and Lin at OdysseySeaGlass.com

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