Kodiak Island: White Sand Beach in Monashka Bay
You wouldn’t think of beautiful white sand beaches when thinking of cold and volcanic Kodiak, but there is a spectacular salt’n’pepper beach on the northern coast, in Monashka Bay, facing the mainland and Katmai National Park across the strait – White Sands Beach. The sand here is the finest and softest imaginable and unlike any other beach. This is actually a geological oddity – when the massive Novaruota volcano erupted in 1912 in Katmai, it dumped 6 feet of ash all around, including on Kodiak (this was the biggest volcanic eruption of the 20th century). So the white sand here is really petrified ash. And I dipped my feet into the relatively warm water.
