Seaside Beach, Mendocino

Seaside Beach and Ten Mile Beach are neighboring beaches along Highway 1, approximately twenty minutes North of Fort Brag.

Seaside is the smaller, Northern, dog-friendly corner of the beach, while Ten Mile Beach prohibits dogs (because it borders the Snowy plover sand dune sanctuary).

The two beaches are technically separated from each other by the Ten Mile River.

Seaside Beach

Seaside Beach is much easier to access than Ten Mile Beach. The parking lot for Seaside Beach is directly in front of the ocean.

As opposed to the large crowds at Fort Brag, Seaside and Ten Mile Beach are much more private. The parking lots can only hold about ten cars each.

I walked down to the shore, and turned South (left) towards Ten Mile Beach. I walked the entire shoreline between the two beaches.

On the Seaside side, there were lots of large rocks full of small caves and arches, and blanketed in succulents.

Unfortunately, succulent poaching is an issue in this area. Those who are caught face tickets, fines, and imprisonment.

As a succulent collector myself, I can’t understand why anyone would feel the need to steal these specific plants.

There are farms that produce sustainable clones of these same species, but when they are ripped directly from a cliff, it causes damage that is very hard and expensive to repair.

As I kept walking, I found lots of pretty shells on Seaside Beach, and thousands of tiny crabs moving into bigger shells.

I also found one lone jellyfish, as well as thousands of sand dollar fragments  (which was only a fraction of the number I saw at Ten Mile Beach).

This is a great beach for hanging out and relaxing, but there wasn’t very much accessible shoreline to traverse.

It only took about half an hour to walk and see this whole beach, after which I moved down the road to Ten Mile Beach.