The walk to Port Townsend's Glass Beach — about six miles round trip from North Beach Park, west past McCurdy Point — needs low water and daylight at once, and 2026 holds exactly four such windows at NOAA station 9444900: September 22 and October 5–7, all short mornings. November and December have none; their 22 below-+1-ft lows each land entirely after dark. The first long afternoon windows return February 15 and March 15, 2027.
Glass Beach is the rare beachcombing destination where the tide table is not a nicety but the whole plan. The glass sits at the end of a shoreline walk that shrinks as the water rises, and — for the next few months — the Sound schedules its low water for the middle of the night. Here is what the predictions actually allow, computed from NOAA station 9444900.
The walk
Access is from North Beach Park, the small day-use area at the north end of Kuhn Street, which Jefferson County describes as "one of the few public access beaches on the north end of the Quimper Peninsula." The county's parks column calls it a popular starting point for beachcombers walking to the old dump site "at what is now known as 'Glass Beach.'" From the lot, follow the beach west under the bluffs. The Spokesman-Review's guide to the walk puts the distance at about three miles one way and notes, "The best pieces are out past McCurdy Point." Beachcombing Magazine describes the same route as a six-mile round trip from North Beach.
There is no shortcut from above: the route is beach the whole way, below a tall bluff, and North Beach Park is both the entrance and the exit. (The Port Townsend and Fort Worden guide covers the beaches on the other side of the park — same station, same windows, no long walk required.)
What the tide has to do with it
The beach you walk is the strip the tide uncovers. The Spokesman-Review says it directly: "At high tides, water covers the narrow beach." Port Townsend's tides run from minus lows to highs near +10 ft, so the difference between a wide walking surface and no walking surface is just the clock.
Tidewindow's windows mark the span when the shore at station 9444900 sits below +1.0 ft MLLW — the threshold the methodology page uses for walkable low-tide ground. That is a conservative bar for this route, but conservative is what you want when the return leg is three miles long: a window is not just depth, it is time, and the fall windows below are as short as 50 minutes. Plan the walk out on the falling tide, so the water is still dropping while you cover ground, and treat the predicted low as the turnaround, not the halfway point of your visit.
The four windows left in 2026
Every remaining 2026 span where below-+1-ft water overlaps daylight at this station, in full:
| Date | Low (ft MLLW) | Time of low | Below +1 ft | Daylight in window | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tue, Sep 22 | +0.90 | 7:43 AM | 7:20–8:10 AM | 50 min | 16 · Skip |
| Mon, Oct 5 | −0.23 | 5:48 AM | 3:55–7:55 AM | 39 min | 27 · Skip |
| Tue, Oct 6 | +0.28 | 6:56 AM | 5:35–8:25 AM | 67 min | 22 · Skip |
| Wed, Oct 7 | +0.88 | 7:54 AM | 7:35–8:20 AM | 45 min | 14 · Skip |
Computed 2026-09-12 from NOAA station 9444900 predictions, MLLW. Scores (0–100) weigh tide depth and daylight together; the methodology page shows how.
Read that table honestly and it says: 2026 is nearly done with this walk. All four windows score in the Skip band — not because the lows are shallow (October 5 is a genuine minus tide, the year's last in daylight) but because the light is gone. October 5's water is below +1 ft for four hours, and only 39 of those 240 minutes overlap daylight. October 6 is the most usable of the four, and it offers 67 minutes. None of these comfortably fits a six-mile round trip inside the window; treat them as mornings where the first half of the walk gets the best beach, and scale your ambition to the leg you can finish in light.
Then the door closes. November and December 2026 each have 22 lows below +1 ft and zero daylight windows — every single low lands after dark. That is not a gap in the data; it is the Sound's winter rhythm, the same one that ends the tide-pooling season at Fort Worden. The October calendar for Port Townsend has each of that month's days in detail.
Winter is when the glass moves — and when you can't reach it
The frustration writes itself: winter is prime season for sea glass. Storm waves strip sand from the beach face and expose the gravel where glass concentrates — the mechanism, with sources, is in the sea glass timing guide and the storm beachcombing guide. But at Port Townsend, the mid-winter lows that would let you walk to the freshly worked gravel happen at night. The season's storms restock Glass Beach while the tide keeps the shop shut.
The reopening, from the October 2026–March 2027 king-tide season's five deepest daylight lows at this station:
| Date | Low (ft MLLW) | Time of low | Below +1 ft | Daylight in window | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon, Jan 18 (MLK Day) | −1.46 | 6:32 PM | 4:10–9:20 PM | 39 min | 59 · Fair |
| Mon, Feb 15 (Presidents' Day) | −0.77 | 5:04 PM | 2:55–7:35 PM | 158 min | 65 · Good |
| Tue, Feb 16 | −1.27 | 6:07 PM | 3:45–8:55 PM | 110 min | 57 · Fair |
| Wed, Feb 17 | −1.64 | 7:06 PM | 4:40–10:00 PM | 57 min | 55 · Fair |
| Mon, Mar 15 | −0.77 | 4:24 PM | 2:20–6:50 PM | 270 min | 60 · Good |
Computed 2026-09-12 from NOAA station 9444900 predictions, MLLW.
Winter flips the schedule to dusk: these lows land between 4:24 and 7:06 PM. The deepest of them, February 17's −1.64 ft, is mostly an after-dark event — 57 daylight minutes. The two to circle are the shallower Mondays. Presidents' Day, February 15, holds 158 daylight minutes of below-+1-ft beach on a holiday afternoon. And March 15 is the season's real prize: its 2:20–6:50 PM window and its daylight overlap are the same 270 minutes — the entire window fits in daylight, the first time that happens after the autumn shutdown, and four and a half hours is finally enough clock for the full walk with time to search. After the winter's storms have worked the beach all season, that is the first full-length daylight look at what they uncovered.
Why there's glass there at all
Glass Beach is a landfill legacy, and the dates are in the county's archives. As the Peninsula Daily News reported from Jefferson County research files, Port Townsend's city council decided in June 1938 that the North Beach area was no longer the place for the public dump, and the city's garbage went instead to the Middle Point area — the stretch now called Glass Beach — until 1962, when the dump moved inland. Six decades of surf have done the rest: the dump itself is gone, and what the waves keep digging up and polishing is its glass. The Spokesman-Review notes that rusting remnants of the old dump era along the upper beach are the sign you have nearly arrived.
That history sets expectations correctly. This is not a beach paved with glass; it is a beach that produces glass, storm by storm, and some visits will out-collect others. The walk, the bluffs, and the Strait views are the guaranteed part.
The other half of the calendar
For completeness: summer is when this station is generous. The July 2026 run was the year's headline — back-to-back −3.48 ft lows on July 13 and 14, with below-+1-ft windows more than six hours long and 375 daylight minutes on the 14th. July held 25 daylight windows and 21 daylight minus tides; even August managed 21 and 13. Those windows made the walk almost trivial to schedule, and their 2027 equivalents will again. The lesson of the table above is simply that between now and then, the walk runs on a handful of exact dates.
Your dates probably aren't the five in the winter table. The Tide Window Finder checks any day you're considering against this station's predictions, and the trip picker finds the best window inside a date range — both use the same NOAA data as the tables here. Predictions are astronomical tides; actual water levels vary with weather, so check conditions before you commit to the far end of a long beach.