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| May 2021 |
Growing up on the East coast glass balls had a sort of mythical hold on me. My dad had a few on display in his office that he had found in Puget Sound in the early 1960s. I desperately wanted to find one too.
When I started to work in Alaska in the 1980s I began my search for glass balls. But I did not find any until the early 1990s. And then I got good at it. The trick is that you almost never find them at the high tide line. You got to search the weeds and berms behind the high tide line. Glass balls even get blown by the wind across fields behind beaches. So you got to look where they will get caught and come to rest.
They are also old trash - so you got to look where similarly aged trash is located. You look for what was once the high tide line and beach berm 50 years ago. I know I am in a good spot when I start finding glass Suntori and Crown Royal Whiskey bottles. This is what fishermen used to drink. Behind modern berms you find plastic water bottles that are preferred by today's mariners..
Another thing to consider is that in the past glass balls got buried in blown beach sand. So you want to look for places where the sand has eroded away and freed the glass balls. Once freed they roll back behind the beach berm and hopefully get caught in a low area or against a backstop.
Finally - everybody likes to find glass balls, and these days everybody has a pretty good idea of where to look for them. So you generally have to go to a pretty remote beach to find them. Places that have not been picked over by other beach combers. On my last survey we hiked some extremely remote coastlines. Places where the beaches are reef bound and difficult to reach even by boat or plane. And that's where we found glass balls!
Patrick
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| May 1994 |
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| This is the kind of beach where you find glass balls - I found one at the edge of the salmonberries behind the bear |
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