Glass Beach - Kauai

A friend told us about an interesting place that isn't in most of the tour guides. We pulled over on the way there and I took this pic.

I told you this place was lush. What isn't beach is jungle.

We got off the highway and took a little dirt road down to the beach below this industrial area.  I know, it does seem odd to find this in the middle of paradise, but the tourists need gas! this is where they store it. We actually parked on the beach just below that tank on the right.

Here's the same beach a bit closer. This was obviously NOT a tourist area. Like I said above, we parked right on the beach and we were the only people there. You see that sand? Guess what? It's not sand!

See? Yeah, there's a little bit of sand, but even most of the tiny pieces are glass. Back in the day, this place was used as the island dump for about 100 years. Most of the big stuff has apparently been removed.  Erosion has taken care of the rest and all that remains is smoothed pieces of glass and metal.

Here is a random handful that I scooped up.

I wanted to see how deep it went, so I scooped out a trench about 10 inches deep. It was still almost all glass.

Here's my wife looking for bigger pieces as a wave recedes. Red sea glass is worth money, the rest not so much. 

In the rocks there were some items that nature was still working on. This is an engine block.

A very large crankshaft

That has nothing to do with the above, I just liked it.

My next post will be about a very old and abandoned Japanese cemetery we found.  Yep, the Japanese were some of the first people to settle on Kauai.

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