The West Seattle Glass Float Hunt runs August 7 through 14 this year, and if you have lived at the Junction for even one previous hunt, you know the drill: net bag, QR code, finders keepers. What you might not have clocked yet is that the block you are about to walk looks different than it did the last time you did this in August 2025. Four storefronts on California between Genesee and Alaska have either changed hands, changed cuisines, or gone under construction in the past ninety days.
That is the case for treating hunt week less like a scavenger game and more like a self-guided audit of what has actually opened, closed, and rebranded on your own street since the last time you paid close attention. The clues will pull you past all of it whether you want them to or not.
What's different on the block since last August
The two most visible changes sit almost across from each other on the south end of the Junction.
At 4752 California SW, the Indian restaurant Taste & Best has opened in the space where the Great American Diner and Bar closed a little over three weeks earlier. Yajas Reddy is the operations manager. The bar side is not open yet as of late July.
One block north at 4719 California SW, Indofusion is the new restaurant and bar owned by the Virk family, which also operates Maharaja Cuisine of India. If you tried to grab a table there in the spring and could not, that is because they were doing a staged opening.
The two chicken chains everyone has been asking about are also finally moving. Starbird has put signage in the windows of its future West Seattle location, the spot where MOD Pizza abruptly closed two years ago, on The Whittaker's 4755 Fauntleroy Way SW frontage, spotlighting its sides as well as its chicken. Around the corner at Junction 47, Dave's Hot Chicken and Gong Cha are going into the two-years-empty ex-Haymaker space at California and Alaska, and building residents have just been notified that construction is about to start.
And the anchor most people forget is even changing: Pegasus Pizza and Pasta has just announced new owners, with Gabriel Castro and Isidro Ocampo, who have been with the restaurant since 1996 as the head chefs and culinary backbone, acquiring it and promising continuity and fresh energy. Same pies, same room, different name on the paperwork.
If you spent last hunt week walking past the Great American Diner window without a second thought, this year the same walk is going to feel unfamiliar in a way you cannot quite place until you stop and look at the signage.
How the hunt actually works
From August 8 through 15 last year, 100 hand-blown glass floats crafted by the artists at Avalon Glassworks were hidden throughout West Seattle, nestled in local businesses, tucked in parks, and waiting to be discovered. The 2026 dates are August 7 through 14. Each morning, daily clues are posted at westseattlefloathunt.com, and the map shows in real time which floats are still out there.
Two things about this year specifically. In honor of the 2026 Seahawks Super Bowl win, the floats are a beautiful green and blue, so if your eye is calibrated to last year's stunning, swirling pinks and purples, each a 4-inch sphere stamped with a heart and "WS" on the sealing bottom, recalibrate. And the visual signature is the same as always: look high and low for beautiful glass balls peeking out through the mesh of a knotted net bag.
The ethics of the hunt are laid out plainly by the organizers:
They are never buried, never in dangerous places, and never in private flowerbeds or behind fences.
If you find yourself considering climbing something or reaching over a gate, you are off the trail. Back up.
The Sunday problem, and how to solve it
The one day of hunt week most residents get wrong is Sunday, August 10.
Sunday is when the West Seattle Farmers' Market takes over the California Avenue block between Alaska and Oregon. That block also happens to be where a meaningful number of the interior float clues sit, because it is the densest concentration of hunt-sponsor businesses in the Junction. If you show up at 11 a.m. with a stroller and a coffee, expecting to breeze past storefront windows, you are going to spend twenty minutes inching through market foot traffic instead.
The move is to flip the order. Do the market first for the produce you actually came for, then loop the interior clues after 2 p.m. once the market breaks down and the sidewalk opens back up. The shops sponsoring floats stay open past market close. The crowds do not.
If Sunday is the only day you can hunt, the outdoor floats hidden in Junction Plaza Park at 42nd Ave SW and around the parks north toward Admiral are the escape valve. Those do not require a shop to be open.
A resident's playbook for the week
The hunt rewards planning slightly more than it rewards volume, which most first-timers get backwards. A tight version of the week looks like this:
- Thursday and Friday, hit the shops that are new since last hunt. Taste & Best, Indofusion, and Pegasus under its new ownership are all worth a stop even if a float is not hiding inside, because the storefront reads differently up close than it does from a car.
- Saturday morning, cover the outdoor clues before the sun is fully up on the west-facing park benches. Green and blue floats sit weirdly well against summer-dry grass, and net bags cast a shadow you can spot from farther away than you think.
- Sunday, market first, then shops after 2 p.m. Do not fight the crowd.
- Tuesday afternoon, the Lander charrette detour.
- Save the last day, Thursday August 14, for the clues that are still unclaimed on the live map. The map is the whole point of the QR system.
The West Seattle Junction Association executive director Chris Mackay describes it as "a fun, free adventure for all ages, inviting people to explore our local parks and businesses while searching for stunning handblown glass floats", and the two-partner structure with the Chamber is why floats show up in shops as far south as Morgan Junction and as far north as Admiral, not only on the California-and-Alaska core.
After the hunt: what comes next on the calendar
The reason the WSJA runs the float hunt in the first place is that it is one of the events that funds the rest of the year's events. Other WSJA-presented events yet to come this year include the Wine Walk on September 18, Harvest Festival on October 25, and Hometown Holidays, with this year's tree-lighting festival on December 5.
If the hunt is your first WSJA event of the season, treat it as the calendar's on-ramp. The same California Avenue blocks are going to close to cars three more times before the end of the year, and each closure surfaces a different slice of what is actually operating on the street. By December, when the tree goes up, Starbird and Dave's Hot Chicken will likely both be open. Taste & Best and Indofusion will have shown whether they stick. The block you are walking on August 10 is not the block you will be walking on December 5.
That, more than the floats themselves, is what makes hunt week worth showing up for as a resident. You get an excuse to notice.
If you are thinking about the Junction not just as a place to walk this week but as a place to plant longer roots, or if a neighbor is asking you what the block feels like right now because they are considering the move, Kelly Zuger knows this stretch of California Avenue at the level of individual storefronts and would rather have that conversation over coffee than over a form. Let's connect.