Salton Sea – 2013

Welcome back!

This week’s post is going to cover a road trip that I went on with my dad and brother in 2013.  We made a loop around the Salton Sea and then returned home, but we stopped at many different locations along the way.  Taking long road trips has been a family tradition for as long as I can remember.  The first one that I can think of was a trip to my Uncle’s house in New Mexico.  We borrowed the Dodge Stratus that my grandparents owned at the time and drove there from San Diego.  It was quite a trip.  I remember playing some sort of bingo game that involved passing cars and filling in a lot of coloring books.

Anyways, back to the Salton Sea.  Here’s a little history lesson.  It was accidentally created in 1905 by the California Development Company.  They were attempting to construct irrigation canals to divert water from the Colorado River into the Salton Sink, a dry lake bed in the Colorado Desert of Southern, CA.  Within 2 years the canal, which was named the Imperial Canal, was filled with Silt from the river.

Engineers tried to alleviate the blockage to no avail and in 1905, due to heavy rainfall and snow melt, the river swelled and overran the headgates of the Alamo Canal and started two new rivers.  These newly formed rivers, the New River and the Alamo River, spilled the entire volume of the Colorado River into the Salton Sink over the next 2 years.  As the basin filled, the town of Salton, a Southern Pacific Railroad siding, and Torres-Martinez Native American land were submerged. The sudden influx of water and the lack of any drainage from the basin resulted in the formation of the Salton Sea.  Even though it is referred to as a sea, it is technically a saltwater lake.

For a number of years the Salton Sea was viewed as a major tourist attraction, with resorts such as the Salton Sea Beach and Desert Shores attracting many big name stars from Hollywood.  But due to the increased salinity of the lake and runoff from agricultural operations, the population of fish began to die.  They were known to wash up on the shores in large quantities creating quite the smell of decay, obviously this cut the tourism way down and eventually killed it.  Now the majority of the land around the lake looks like an apocalyptic ghost town.

 

This brings us to the road trip.  My brother had read about the Sea and he loves to explore abandoned buildings etc, so we decided to make the drive.  At this time my cellphone camera wasn’t all that great, I didn’t have a point and shoot, and my tablet was so-so.  That being said this post is going to be more word-centric than visual 🙁 .  We left somewhat late that day from what I remember, that typically happens on vacation and 9 times out of 10 it’s entirely my fault.  I mean it’s vacation!  Why would I want to force myself to get up early to go drive for hours??  Because adventure.  Unfortunately it typically takes me until about 10:00 or so to see the fun in the drive.  But the trip still happens every time so it’s all good!

We left around 10:00 and made our way up Lamb Canyon from Hemet heading towards Beaumont, CA.  The quickest route to the desert from where I live is the 10 freeway, and the quickest way to the 10 is Lamb Canyon.

To get to the Sea you follow the 10 until you reach Indio then you merge onto the 86 for the western shore or find the 111 for the north shore.  It’s actually a little complicated to explain via text, so just google it.  We opted for the western Shore to start and then made our way to the north shore.  Our first stop was Desert Shores:

Above was our first view of the sea, we had to drive through a mobile home park that looked like something out of an apocalyptic wasteland.  I’m not even exaggerating:

Like I said before, I apologize for the small number of pictures and for the poor quality.  After visiting desert shores we continued along the road until we found the Salton Sea Beach.  We drove through another Mobile home park which was kind of the theme for this trip.  Lots of driving and lots of abandoned buildings/ mobile homes.  Some areas were just downright sketchy to be honest, we’re talking about “don’t get out of your car” sketchy, haha.

After the mobile home park was the Marina.  This was the first point of contact that we had with the outside world since Indio.  There was a store in the building behind my car in the picture below, so we grabbed a local newspaper, something to drink and a bag of chips.

My car had less than 50,000 miles in that picture, I’m up to 151,000 now and it’s still running strong.  After the Salton Sea Beach there really wasn’t much to talk about until we arrived in Westmorland.  Ah yes Westmorland, I should apologize in advance to any of my readers that may live there… I wasn’t exactly a fan of the -erm- “decor”.  I would leave it at that but I just can’t.  Let’s just say that I have never driven through a region of the country that I’ve wanted to get out of quicker.  I mean this place might as well be renamed the armpit of America.  It was complete with abandoned buildings and hanging street lights. I didn’t bother pulling out my camera.  But here is a picture of the area surrounding Westmorland:

It was at this moment that we stopped and began to question our purpose in life.  To try and arrive at the driving factor (see what I did there?) that propelled us towards this low point in our traveling lives.  Or we could have just stopped to figure out where the heck we were, haha.  We were trying to locate slab city, an old military base that was abandoned and then overrun with hippies in RVs.  And on the way to slab city is Salvation Mountain.  We discovered that both spots were a little ways north of our current spot.  So thankfully we moved on and arrived in a much better area, Niland:

Just kidding!  This was the nicest building in Niland.  Now would probably be a good time to explain something.  You’re probably asking yourself, “Why did they have to stop and find out where they were?  What about GPS?”.  Well you see that’s the thing with GPS on your phone, there are pros and cons.  Some of the pros are:

1. You carry one device
2. See number one

The list of cons is a little longer:

1. You’re using one device for music etc. so the battery only lasts so long
2. Unless you have a really strong car charger, when it runs low you can’t listen to music, navigate and charge your battery at the same time.
3. You can’t use the maps effectively without cell service, which is spotty at best out there.
4. Doing so many things eats up data.

Regarding the charging issue, it was so bad that we had to turn GPS off or the battery would continue to deplete even if the phone was plugged in.  Yeah, seriously.

We eventually found Salvation mountain:

I know that I took more pictures than this, but they seem to be missing.  This place was actually kind of creepy.  It made me think of someone on some crazy drugs, not God.  All three of us had the same feeling.  But it was still really cool to see and we explored for quite a while.   Afterwards we continued down the road to the entrance of slab city but it was super sketchy so we didn’t drive in.

After this was drove along the north shore stopping occasionally.  We came across this one spot where it was obvious that flooding had wiped out a previous town:

 

This is also the place where I took my favorite picture of the trip:

It’s truly amazing and strange to see just how still the waters are.  As you can see it was like a mirror.  Also, remember how I mentioned that the smell of dead fish helped end the life of the resorts?  Well that smell has not disappeared.  It smells so bad that we drove with the recirculation on during the entire trip.  That pretty much sums up our journey to the Salton Sea, we embarked on the long drive home and that’s that.

Based on what I’ve written so far you’re probably asking yourself, “Why would anyone in their right mind take a road trip like this on purpose?”.  Well we love exploring new areas and discovering things.  Plus it’s bonding time between the three of us.  Now that my brother and I are adults with jobs, we really don’t get to see each other that often.  And that goes for our dad as well.  But trust me this is only the beginning, my next post will be about another trip where we visited Bagdad and Siberia.  No I’m not joking.

If you liked this post please make sure to share it and leave a comment!  Until then this is Greg.  Over and out.