United States

West Beach - Deception Pass State Park

This is within Deception Pass State Park, and there is a fee to enter unless you have a Discover Pass - I believe it's $10. Park at the West Beach lot and head down the beach, combing the small rocks on the beach close to the tide, and you should find some glass. The earlier you go, the better, and I highly recommend going when the tide is low. The further you get from the lot, the better the picking.

Semiahmoo Spit - behind the resort

The best combing is located along the stretch behind the resort. Be aware of where you park! You can walk the entire length of the beach, but make sure to bring water. It's a longer walk than it looks! Also be mindful of access points so as not to cross private property. There are plenty of access points that don't pass through resort property

Glass Beach, Port Townsend

The only rich sea glass beach in America you can lawfully collect on, and it makes you earn it: a nine-kilometre round trip along the shore from North Beach County Park out to McCurdy Point, with the tide deciding whether you get back. There are few to no escape routes under the bluff, so read the tide table before you set out, not after. What is waiting is jewellery-grade glass, marbles and old china, with cobalt turning up in quantity. Start from the county park. The point itself is reached down a private road, so don't be tempted.

Bottle Beach State Park

While 99% of what you will find here is still rough and not 'tumbled' enough, there is a fair amount of glass on this beach. The entrance to the state park is very sudden along the highway, and it is a fee area - $10 unless you have a Discover Pass. The walk to the beach is flat and crosses a boardwalk and a bridge under which some river otters can be seen occasionally. The tide goes WAY out when it's low, but the best finds are close to the high-tide line.

Rosario Beach - Deception Pass State Park

This is a fee area - $10 unless you have a Discover Pass. Parking is limited, so the earlier you come, the better. The trail down to the beach is a little steep, and you might need to cross driftwood logs to get closer to shore. There's excellent tidepooling here, and the hike to Rosario Head is short and beautiful

Post Point Marine Park

Free parking! Be mindful not to cross into the Post Point Lagoon from under the rail bridge as it is a protected estuary that is home to a heron colony. Also, do not climb over (or under) the railroad track - it is very active and in a quiet zone, so trains often approach without warning.

Weather Watch Park, West Seattle

Go in the morning when the tide is low and walk along the seawall.

Howarth Park, Everett

Everett's beachcombing shore on Puget Sound, reached by the pedestrian bridge over the railway tracks from the park's north lot. The beach opens right up at low tide, and sea glass turns up among the stones along with tide pools full of starfish and anemones. A modest, steady city hunt rather than a jackpot, and a pretty one, with the Sound in front and the Olympics behind on a clear day.

Barcelona Beach

Personally found the most pieces by the edge of the water in the gravel. Don’t be afraid to dig! I also found larger pieces towards where the high tide had fallen! You can find glass all throughout the area. My sister has also found many pieces of pottery there as well as pieces that still have raised glass lettering on them! You can definitely find some cobalt blue there as well.

Astoria Park Shore

tons of glass, both old and new

Wolf's Pond Park

Durand Eastman Park

Don't go if the winds are out if the Northeast or Northwest as the waves can cover most of the beach.

Field 2

Sodus Point Beach

Bradley Point, West Haven

The shore walk at Bradley Point crosses what was once Savin Rock amusement park, Connecticut's own Coney Island from the 1870s to the 1960s. Long Island Sound is a slow tumbler, so expect a few well-frosted pieces an hour rather than a haul. Keep off Sandy Point across the harbour: it's a nesting-bird sanctuary.

Seaside Beach

Only at low tide. About a 1/2 mile of beach to walk.

Green harbor beach

Seaside sanitorium

Headlands Beach State Park, Mentor

Ohio's longest natural beach sits at the industrial mouth of the Grand River, and the long sand catches what Lake Erie digs up from its dumping era. Walk east toward the Fairport Harbor breakwater lighthouse and read the pebble lines: whites and greens, some aqua, the occasional cobalt. A patience beach. It produces off-season and after storms.

Walnut Beach, Ashtabula

Ashtabula loaded coal and iron ore for a hundred years, and the beach west of the breakwater still pays out the harbour's glass on a slow low-water walk. The town leans into the hobby: the Beach Glass Festival has filled the harbour district every June since 2010.

Huntington Beach

After storms is best and southern winds. Best when the waves bring in pebbles. Digging yields beach glass. If you can try and cross the creek to go to the other side of the creek

Perkins Beach

Rolls in with waves. Walk the waterline. Dig under the first layer.

Glass Beach, Kodiak

The glass here has the best origin story on the map: the bottles of a local bar, swept into the sea by the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake, the strongest ever recorded in North America. Sixty years of Gulf of Alaska surf later, multicoloured pieces still scatter the shoreline at the eastern edge of Kodiak Bay. Getting there is the trick, and visitors on the wrong trail come home empty: don't follow the Boy Scout Lake loop. Park in the pullout on Rezanof Drive just BEFORE the Boy Scout Lake parking, and take the old road that starts at the yellow gate down toward the shore. The glass beach itself is small, so it only shows at low tide, and locals say it gets picked hard these days. Kodiak weather is its own adventure, and so are the bears: make noise on the trail.

Mill Bay Beach, Kodiak

The town beach Kodiak collectors call a gold mine. Mill Bay Beach Park sits at the end of a residential street ten minutes from downtown, with easy parking and a mixed sand-and-gravel shore that keeps producing: one local reported a good haul here as recently as last summer, at low tide as always. The island's regulars say the easy beaches get picked hard these days, so go with the tide, not after a sunny weekend.

Mission Beach, Kodiak

A gravelly stretch along Mission Road just southeast of downtown Kodiak, past Mission Lake. Local beachcombers name it in the same breath as Mill Bay as a reliable in-town stop, a place where glass turns up along the tideline rather than a jackpot. Work it at low tide and pair it with Mill Bay, five minutes up the road, for a proper Kodiak town circuit.

Bar Island Bar, Bar Harbor

At low tide a gravel bar rises out of Frenchman Bay and joins Bar Harbor to Bar Island, and its flanks collect a century of the old waterfront's glass. You get about ninety minutes either side of low water before the bar drowns again, so check the tide table and don't linger. One boundary to respect: the island itself is Acadia National Park, where nothing may be removed. Hunt the town side.

Crescent Beach State Park Beach

Crescent Beach is a fee area within Crescent Beach State Park. It is $6/day for a Maine resident and $8/day for a non-Maine resident; they charge per person instead of one flat fee, so two non-residents would be $16 and so on. The combing is a little tricky, but you can find smaller pieces close to the tide line. Amber and clear/white is most common with blues and greens more rare.

East End Beach, Portland

Portland's town beach below the Eastern Promenade, and Maine's most reliable everyday hunt. A century of harbour traffic in Casco Bay feeds the rocky end of the beach with whites, ambers, greens and the odd soft blue. Come at low tide and work the gravel, not the sand.

Rockport

Lots of rare ones, got marbles and pirate glass

Spectacle Island

Take nothing. The park names sea glass in its own rules: visitors are asked to leave behind any natural or cultural resources they find, including, but not limited to, sea glass, seashells and ceramics. The beaches here are thick with it. This was Boston's dump for decades, capped and landscaped into an island park, and pale green Depression glass comes up alongside willow-pattern china and cup handles. Some of it is barely frosted: a sheltered harbour does not tumble like an ocean coast. Ticketed ferry, May to October. Come to look.

Pavilion Beach, Gloucester

A rocky pocket beach inside America's oldest fishing port. Gloucester's working harbour has been dropping glass into these waters for two centuries, and the shingle between the tides gives a piece or two of it back at a time. Park off Western Avenue, wait for low water, and comb the pebble bands.

Fort Zachary Taylor State Park

Probably best at low tide! I dug through lots of rocky sand and shells to find my glass.

Jensen Beach, Hutchinson Island

Florida is shelling country, and this is its honest sea glass beach: ordinary Atlantic bottle glass with no dump story behind it, frosted properly by coarse sand and real surf. Expect a piece here and there for a heads-down walker, browns and greens and whites, best at low tide after an onshore blow. A beach you comb on the way to somewhere else, and all the better for it.

Van's Beach, Leland

Leland's glass is not bottle glass at all. From 1870 to 1884 an iron smelter dumped its slag into the harbour, and Lake Michigan has been tumbling the blue-grey waste into 'Leland Blue' ever since. Look for matte blue, purple-grey and green stones with tiny bubbles, best after the storms of October to April

Stonington, MI

Private beaches with some public access at Bay de Noc campground

Presque Isle State Park, Erie

Lake Erie spent a century burying Erie's bottle glass, and this sandy peninsula catches what comes back. The park says outright that taking beach glass is allowed, and even runs craft workshops with it. The easy stretches get picked over; walk the rockier southwest beaches and come after a storm.

Beach 1

Simmons Island Beach, Kenosha

The strongest beach-glass shore on Lake Michigan. Kenosha's factory-era lakefront and old city dumps feed a beach where a patient morning still fills a pouch: ambers and whites alongside cobalt, teal and lavender, with a red or an orange for somebody every winter. Storms do the restocking, and the city's own visitor guide will happily point you at the sand.

Wisconsin Point

Lots of smallish pieces

Georgia

Driftwood Beach

Hawaii

Glass Beach, Port Allen, Kauai

There is almost nothing left. Glass Beach was famous for a shingle of tumbled glass from the industrial dump above it; by 2024 local reporting put it at over 99 percent gone, carried off in pockets and jars, a handful at a time. What you find today is small fragments among the volcanic rock, brown and green with the odd aqua, and hand-lettered signs asking you plainly to leave them. Please do. It is a short walk from Port Allen, and it is worth seeing for what it says about what happens to a beach that becomes a destination.

Illinois

Pratt Pier Beach

To access this beach, walk down Pratt Pier toward the lighthouse. You'll need to climb through the safety fence to access the beach. Alternatively, take the sandy trailhead near the start of the pier. Pratt Pier serves as an important wave break, and summer storms bring the best glass. Most pieces you'll find are smaller than a fingernail. Green and clear are the most common colors, although the rare blue or amber piece is worth the hunt!

New Jersey

Sunset Beach, Cape May Point

The beach at the very tip of Cape May, facing the concrete wreck of the SS Atlantus. Its fame rests on the 'Cape May diamonds', which are quartz pebbles polished by Delaware Bay, not glass. Real sea glass rides the same currents onto the same sand, though. Summer visitors pick it clean by mid-morning; a winter morning is the honest window.

North Carolina

Waterfront Park, Southport NC

There is a small pier next to the park, when you go under the pier there is a small rocky beach. This had tons of glass- not all of it was smooth but it was still super exciting to search and find them. We even found a few pieces of pottery too!

Rhode Island

Rocky Point State Park, Warwick

For over a century this headland was Rocky Point Amusement Park. The rides closed in 1995, the shoreline reopened in 2011, and Narragansett Bay has been handing back the park's glass ever since: whites, greens and ambers with aqua, seafoam and the odd lavender. The easy pickings of the early years are gone. Come after a blow and take your time.

Texas

Texas City Dike

A five-mile man-made finger poking into Galveston Bay, and the honey hole of Gulf beachcombing. A century of ship-channel traffic and early-1900s dumping washes glass onto the rocks of the north side: whites, ambers and greens with aqua, lavender and now and then a red. Drive the dike road and work the riprap. Mind your footing on those rocks.

Virginia

Saxis

Low tide treasures! Water shoes and bug spray!