The Salton Sea

Whenever I go somewhere, I like to do laps around famous things.

For example, when I went to New Orleans for a visit, I went down to Bourbon Street and walked down the entire length of it and back up again. (And it is, let me tell you, one seedy place. Going to it once because it is the most famous thing in the city is justified. Going more than one is not necessary, thankyew.)

When I went to the Salton Sea, therefore, I did a lap around it.

I drove up the east-hand side of it first, stopping at Bombay Beach and the state park visitors’ center, then turned around and came back down the west-hand side.

Oh yeah. . . . and I promised to tell you why I went there in the first place. . . .

The basic reason was that I’d known the name of the place since I was a boy. That’s just the name–nothing else. I had no idea it was in California. I think I saw it on a globe somewhere, and the name "Salton Sea," kind of stuck with me as a cool name, even though I had no idea where it was.

I think I thought it was in Asia or someplace. That’s understandable. To a little boy growing up in the South, California and Asia are pretty much the same thing. (Don’t even get me started on what I thought the geography of New England was like. I still get fuzzy once you get farther north than Kentucky.)

So I ended up moving to California to work for Catholic Answers and had NO IDEA that the Salton Sea was nearby. Even after I discovered that it was, I waited a long time before going there, but finally broke down and decided to go and "see the elephant," as they say. After the huge coincidence of moving near a place that had a name which had been stuck in my memory since childhood, how could I not?

My first stop at the sea itself was a "town" named Bombay Beach, which is basically a trailer park that has a volunteer fire department and a restaurant. No great shakes. They may have given it the name "Bombay Beach" back in the 1950s, when they were tryint to turn the Salton Sea in to a resort scene, but it obviously didn’t work (for reasons that will become obvious).

Almost all of the homes in Bombay Beach are trailers with chain-link fences around them. I did, however, find this REMARKABLE house:

I wish that I had a real camera with me at the time instead of just a camera phone, because this is one of the most oddly decorated structures I’ve seen. In the front there is a large round object (a propane tank?) decorated with a smiley face and a black bowler, next to a sign that says "HAVE A NICE DAY," while back on the house itself there are a couple of silhouettes of cap-wearing gentlemen slouching and smoking their pipes (probably not a good thing to do right next to a propane tank).

It all seems relaxed and casual and friendly, but I have NO IDEA what any of this was about.

Below, however, is a more typical residence in Bombay Beach. It’s a manufactured home behind a chainlink fence. This one, however, has an abundance of cacti and other desert-type plants along the fence. The cacti display was particularly interesting, but didn’t come out well on the camera phone. (Don’t worry. I now have a real camera and better pictures will accompany further trips.)

This is the visitors center at the Salton Sea state park. As you can see, it was a busy day with many smiling, happy families bustling about the place, anxious to learn more about the science and history of the Salton Sea and to enjoy the fishing and boating and other watersports available on it.

Oh, no wait! I’m sorry. The visitor’s center was EMPTY with a hand-written sign on the door saying "VISITORS CENTER CLOSED UNTIL OCTOBER" That’s right! I forgot. My bad.

(My visit was in September, and it was still pretty hot out here in the desert.)

The only other people who were there at the time I was were a Russian couple. The husband was in swim trunks and (briefly) tried wading in the sea before giving up and leaving, deciding that the water was not to his taste.

Why was that?

Well . . . Here’s a picture of some of the water in a boat-dock inlet. Looks a little . . . uh . . . brown.

That’s ’cause they were having one of their (frequent) "ALGAE BLOOMS" (same general class of phenomena as a "red tide," only this was brown instead of red). That meant lots of dying algae in the water, leading the park rangers to install handy (permanent!) signs with cartoon seagulls and titles like "WHAT’S THAT SMELL?" offering explanations of the science of sea to visitors and their children.

But you can use the tranquil brown water to make interesting silhouettes. Here’s a self-portrait. (Which, now that I think about it, looks REMARKABLY like one of those that I saw back in Bombay Beach. Perhaps THAT’S what inspired them!)

By the way, did you catch that salt buildup on the mooring post (or whatever it is)? Here’s a closer look:

 

And the salt shows up on the shore, too!

The Salton Sea has no outlet, so it is constantly being filled by agricultural runoff water that leads it to have an unusually high saline content. This is one of the causes of the algae blooms, the algae being one of the few things that survives well in this environment.

I wonder why this place never took off as a resort?

I mean . . . from SOME angles the water looks ALMOST normal. . . .

The above pictures are from the boat-dock inlet. There’s also a picturesque beach, apparently artifically made. . . .

How do I know it’s artificially made?

It ain’t sand. It’s crushed seashells shipped in from elsewhere.

Looks nice except for that creepy algae-water, though. Wonder why the Russian guy didn’t wade longer than he did?

Visitors center looks good though. All ready for those hordes of resort-vacationer visitors.

Just for fun, let’s look AWAY from the sea. . .

Now let’s look BACK AT the sea. . . .

Y’know, I just can’t figure out why the Salton Sea is such a hotbed of political controversy in California.

The sea didn’t even exist a hundred years ago. It wasn’t until we humans made some mistakes channeling the water of the Colorado River, causing it to burst its banks and overflow into the Salton Sink, causing the sea to come into existence. So the Salton Sea is an ARTIFICIAL body of water that, after being a failed resort, is now the recipient of a lot of agro-runoff water.

Yet some folks apparently just can’t appreciate its natural beauty and want the state of California to LET THE SEA JUST DRY UP AND BE DONE WITH IT INSTEAD OF SPENDING ALL KINDS OF MONEY TO KEEP IT IN EXISTENCE.

Now why would anyone want THAT to happen?

Fortunately, for those who do show up at the Sea, there are some helpful things at the visitors center, even when it’s closed for half of the year (or whatever). Like this plaque, teling the Sea’s history. . . .

In addition to doing laps when I go somewhere famous, I also like to get a picture of myself there. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of people there, and I didn’t want to bug the Russians (who were busy being grossed out by the water), so I took this self-portrait with my cellphone. . . .

 

And that was my trip to the Salton Sea–land of boyhood dreams!

NEXT (in this series): The Monster That Challenged The World!