Tour Around the Salton Sea…

This is the 2nd time I’ve visited the Salton Sea area, but during the first visit I didn’t have a car so I could not easily tour. This time with the car, I decided to just circumnavigate the sea and have a look. On the side I am staying on, the west side, there’s not much of the sea to see. I’d already visited the small housing developments of Desert Shores and Salton Sea Beach along the seashore that exist nearby where I was staying and they are certainly showing their ages. Even at those places there were scant opportunities to actually get anywhere near the sea. There’s really not a lot of access to it. No obvious public beaches or boat ramps that I could find. I did find some man made canals running a hundred yards from the sea inland, but their purpose escaped me. No fishing boats in them. They didn’t smell all that pleasant either. I did see some governmental environmental research buildings on one of those canals but they seemed long abandoned.

Here’s a history of the Salton Sea that helps understand it’s recent history. Worth the read. It’s the result of a human engineering accident back in 1905 which went on for two years and was considered a catastrophe back when it happened.

This is a Public Domain photo I found on Wikipedia that shows how nice the sea can be at times.

Anyway, I drove north 7 miles from the RV park, then crossed over to the east side of the sea, then continued down the east side for 35 odd miles, then back up the west side back to home base. Stopping occasionally along the way. So a 2-3 hour adventure.

Here I’m heading north on CA-86 to the crossover point. Check out the ‘desert’ type landscape and try to imagine how freak’en hot it would be here in the summer what with the valley being lower than sea level and in southern California.

And here we are, taking this exit heads over to highway 111.
And now heading south on CA-111. Note the date trees on one side, and some other cultivated plant on the other. Not sure what those plants are since I didn’t really recognize them.  And here! An actual place to stop and see the sea close up! Yea!
I’m at a community center. That white truck over there was a veggie and fruit truck. Don’t know where it was from but everyone working there was Mexican. It’s sort of a farmers market type thing for the locals. I wandered into the building and checked it out. Found some parents queued up to sign up their kids for something. When I crossed the hall into the gymnasium, there was a young woman leaned up against the door frame. As I passed, it was easy to tell she was crying about something. After checking out the gym, I saw her sitting on the stairway behind the receptionists counter, still crying. I let it be. Usually I’d try to help out, but today, nah. Use to be some boats around here it appears. This place use to be the North Shore Marina but now it’s a community center. It did once have a nice bar with a view of the boats…which are all gone now. And what use to be access to the sea. Looks like they blocked it off, or that the water reduced level so far that it’s no longer deep enough to use. It’s gotten very salty too so that it’s not a pleasant boating expirience any longer and the marina died. Took a walk on the trail and here’s a many decades old shore side open air restaurant near the community center. On the grounds actually. I could tell from what’s left of the painted ads on the building that it was once a Mexican style place. A look back at the CC. Kind of looks like a desert around here… And we’re back at the CC. A few miles on, and there’s this state run RV park and recreation area. Quite large. Prices are outrageous for dry camping. Easy to blame Reagan since he pushed the idea. Than did the same to National parks. You know, so there would be more money for wars.

Hey, look at that, a wiki-up. One of the RV areas. Not very inviting. There’s the only services, a trash bin.OK, down the road a mile or so to the other section…
This is more like it, and it’s fairly empty. Likely to get even worse as the sea’s level drops.These are dry camps, and day camps, usually cars or truck campers park at these. One of them did have a car gypsy type setup. Looked settled in for the long term. With a guy peering out at me from behind a trash bag curtain inside the car as I passed.

Big parking lot with hundreds of RV places marked on the blacktop. Off in the distance along that row of tall trees are the RV spaces with hookups. Looked like 30 amp.   Nice boat ramp that’s slowly losing it’s meaning as the sea level is dropping rapidly with no plans to restore it. And here I am heading due south.  And now due west. The sea is off to the right. So far away I couldn’t see the sea. There is some farm land here, and I suspect they get most of their water from wells. As the sea is too salty for irrigation.And now heading north on CA-86.
Pretty close to home. I like the starkness of areas like this. I grew up in the deserts of eastern Washington so I’m kind of fond of this type of landscape. But not in the summer.

And shortly after, stopped at the Red Earth Casino got gas along with some nice bean soup, than headed home. Nice little trip. Now I know what the sea area use to be like and can see how it’s fading fast. Not much new development in the area. Many closed businesses and shuttered or dilapidated homes. Except where there’s active farming going on, most areas looked run down. Beginning to look like all the smart money has left. Well, that’s to be expected I suppose since the sea wasn’t suppose to be here in the first place.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed the tour of the Salton Sea of Imperial Valley, California.

On Edit: Not long after I published this article, there was a TV documentary by a wandering news reporter about how the sea was being emptied but there were scores of people whose livelihoods do or did depend on the sea. And that there were massive fish kills that are a result of the lowering sea levels. This happened in mud flats which dry out over time in the hot summers here, than the wind blows dust around causing the highest per capita incidence of life threatening asthma attacks in the US. Some of these people should have seen the handwriting on the wall and left at their own volition, as draining the sea was foretold for over a decade by the California government, but some were just too poor to be able to move. And they are the people now in trouble around here.