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Trolling Agate Beach
Jul. 31st, 2025 10:52 amNorth Coast Roadtrip travelog #4
Sue-meg State Park · Sat, 26 Jul 2025, 12:30pm
Saturday morning we drove from Garberville up past Eureka and Arcata on the north coast to Agate Beach. Agate Beach is a perennial favorite of Hawk's because it's a great place to troll for rocks, particularly agates. Visiting this beach to go rock-hounding is one of the centerpieces of this weekend trip. And it's a thing we've been meaning to do for... over a year now. It took us this long to get around to it. (We finally made concrete plans when I threw a fit earlier in the week about too many weekends lolling around at home.)
A visit to Agate Beach starts with a walk down from the cliffs. Fortunately there's a good trail here, with switchbacks at the top and stairs at the bottom. This is part of a state park, the recently renamed Sue-meg State Park. It was called Patrick's Point when we visited here a few times in the past. California State Parks renamed it in 2021 to the traditional name used by the Hurok people.
Agate Beach has always seemed like a quiet, remote area. Not so much today, though. Today the day-use parking lot was nearly full, and not just with people who came to visit the beach in general but people who came specifically for rock-hounding.
It was obvious most people were here for rock-hounding because they were all carrying specially designed shovels for picking rocks on the beach. It's like someone posted on Facebook, "OMG rockhounding at agate beach is the bestest thing EVAR!" and helpfully included a link to their shovel-selling page on Etsy. Because everyone, like dozens of people, had basically the same shovel. 🤣
Well, Hawk was doing it old-school, picking rocks by hand. We started near the bottom of the trail, where we'd always found so many things on past visits, but gradually migrated further out on the beach as the center area was getting pretty well picked-over by all the other rock-hounds.
On previous trips Hawk came home with quite a haul from Agate Beach. Today she was more selective a took only a handful of rocks. Partly that's because she's become more knowledgeable of the kind of rocks on the beach. Most of the stones here are basalt. Most of the white ones, which people commonly mistake for agate, are quartz. In fact many people proudly showed Hawk zip-lock bags full of stones they'd picked up with their shovels— oddly, identically sized zip-lock bags they picked up with their identically designed shovels— only for Hawk to tell them that all but 1 or 2 of the pieces in their bags were quartz.
I found a lot of pretty stones in olive green and orange-red colors, many with banded shades. Hawk identified these as jasper. She already has a lot of jasper, so we left those stones for others to find.
On previous trips I found a lot of sand dollars out here. There were none today. I don't know if that's a seasonality thing or if they had already been scooped up by all the other beachcombers.
Sue-meg State Park · Sat, 26 Jul 2025, 12:30pm
Saturday morning we drove from Garberville up past Eureka and Arcata on the north coast to Agate Beach. Agate Beach is a perennial favorite of Hawk's because it's a great place to troll for rocks, particularly agates. Visiting this beach to go rock-hounding is one of the centerpieces of this weekend trip. And it's a thing we've been meaning to do for... over a year now. It took us this long to get around to it. (We finally made concrete plans when I threw a fit earlier in the week about too many weekends lolling around at home.)
A visit to Agate Beach starts with a walk down from the cliffs. Fortunately there's a good trail here, with switchbacks at the top and stairs at the bottom. This is part of a state park, the recently renamed Sue-meg State Park. It was called Patrick's Point when we visited here a few times in the past. California State Parks renamed it in 2021 to the traditional name used by the Hurok people.
Agate Beach has always seemed like a quiet, remote area. Not so much today, though. Today the day-use parking lot was nearly full, and not just with people who came to visit the beach in general but people who came specifically for rock-hounding.
It was obvious most people were here for rock-hounding because they were all carrying specially designed shovels for picking rocks on the beach. It's like someone posted on Facebook, "OMG rockhounding at agate beach is the bestest thing EVAR!" and helpfully included a link to their shovel-selling page on Etsy. Because everyone, like dozens of people, had basically the same shovel. 🤣
Well, Hawk was doing it old-school, picking rocks by hand. We started near the bottom of the trail, where we'd always found so many things on past visits, but gradually migrated further out on the beach as the center area was getting pretty well picked-over by all the other rock-hounds.
On previous trips Hawk came home with quite a haul from Agate Beach. Today she was more selective a took only a handful of rocks. Partly that's because she's become more knowledgeable of the kind of rocks on the beach. Most of the stones here are basalt. Most of the white ones, which people commonly mistake for agate, are quartz. In fact many people proudly showed Hawk zip-lock bags full of stones they'd picked up with their shovels— oddly, identically sized zip-lock bags they picked up with their identically designed shovels— only for Hawk to tell them that all but 1 or 2 of the pieces in their bags were quartz.
I found a lot of pretty stones in olive green and orange-red colors, many with banded shades. Hawk identified these as jasper. She already has a lot of jasper, so we left those stones for others to find.
On previous trips I found a lot of sand dollars out here. There were none today. I don't know if that's a seasonality thing or if they had already been scooped up by all the other beachcombers.
