Beach Glass Hunting... 1 Hour on a Lake Michigan Beach

Today we decided to explore a very small, dingy beach near us, but we had a time limit due to our mother's work schedule. With what little time we had, we dug through piles of ground-up mussel shells and waded along the shoreline to search for beach glass. I'd have to say that it was a pretty good haul. This particular beach is not the prettiest, but glass washes up on it as much as all of the other junk. Here are some photos of what we discovered...

This is a shot of all of the glass together... pretty good for only one hour of searching!

This is another photo of all of the beach glass. There was actually quite a bit more glass on the beach, but we chose to only take some of the nicer pieces. At this point, we have started to be a little more picky about what we take because our collection has grown so much.

Here we have separated it into colors. You can see that white/clear is obviously the most common color, but there is also quite a bit of blue on this beach as well. We even found a couple of marbles!

We found quite a few small red pieces today, which is exciting because red is very rare, especially in Lake Michigan. Red is considered the second-rarest color of beach glass (orange is the rarest). Collectors estimate that one red piece of glass is found for about every 5,000 pieces of other colors.

This is the mixture of blue and aqua pieces we found today, along with a quarter and a dime for size reference. There were only a couple of pieces that were good enough to be considered "jewelry quality", which shows how hard it is to find flawless pieces of beach glass.

And here is another shot of the blues.

From our experiences today, here are some little tips about searching for glass on a rather dirty or cluttered beach...

1. Search the piles of shells and rocks that build up. If lots of things are piling up in one place, it is pretty much guaranteed that glass will be among that mass as well.

2. Don't be afraid to wade in the water to search for the beach glass. Generally, when we see a piece below the water's surface, we scoop up the glass, along with a handful of the rocks/sand around it. Then we walk onto the beach and dump the handful, picking out the piece of glass. This method may take more time, but it works particularly well on a wavy days, because it decreases the chance that you will lose the glass by fumbling for the little piece as the wave tumbles it around.

Happy beach combing!

- Hailey and Will