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Beauty and Decay on the Salton Sea
story and photos by Heather Quinn

Weekend Warrior: This trailer has probably been in this exact spot along the shoreline in Bombay Beach since the 80s, when storms caused the Salton Sea to swell beyond its banks and flood shoreline communities.

Somewhere near El Centro on a road trip through the Imperial Valley we pulled into the dust to investigate a compound of abandoned houses. Overgrown with palm trees in the middle of the desert, the group of buildings had the look of an oasis, but the Imperial Valley is often a land of mirage and appearances are reliably deceiving. The houses were deserted and rotting. Dust – dry and soft as ash – rose in the air and instantly filled the car, and I tasted salt.

Those ruined houses seemed to foreshadow the far reaching destruction of the inland sea some miles to the north – our destination, the Salton Sea. In fact, there was much worse to come. Masquerading through much of its short history as a vacation destination, a playground for the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dezi Arnaz, these days it’s hard to mistake the sea for what it truly is – a filthy, toxic cesspool.

The most striking thing about the Salton Sea – aside from the stench that announces its presence from miles away – is the improbability of its existence in the middle of the desert. The sea is immense, stretching as far as the eye can see into a horizon broken occasionally by jagged mountains.

With your nose plugged, it does have a surreal beauty, its calm waters mirroring the perfect blue desert sky above. And maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but there’s something different about the look of that water, a thickness that lent it the color of quicksilver – maybe from the salt, maybe from the sludge, maybe just my imagination, who knows. Regardless, the essential characteristic of the sea is its unnaturalness. Nature could never create such a fluke, and nature will not sustain it.

The Salton Sea fills a basin that was once an inland sea, an extension of the Gulf of California, covering the Imperial Valley all the way to Indio, called the Salton Sink. The gulf receded and the sea remained temporarily, only to evaporate in the heat of the desert with no fresh water to feed it. Since then, the basin would periodically fill during periods when the Colorado River altered its course through the sink, creating a prehistoric lake known as Lake Cahuilla, not seen for at least 300 years, according to www.saltonsea.ca.gov, until the current incarnation of the ancient lake. The present sea similarly reflects a change of course for the Colorado River, this time caused by man, not nature.

In the early 1900s river silt threatened to clog irrigation canals that siphoned Colorado River water into Imperial Valley farmland. Engineers hastily improvised a bypass channel to relieve some of the pressure, but heavy rainfall in 1905 caused this secondary canal to overflow, quickly filling in the Salton Sink to form the present lake. Government and business interests quickly set about turning lemons into lemonade, promoting the lake as a fishing and recreation destination, climaxing in the 50s when it was hyped as a “Western Riviera,” a resort paradise for the rich and famous, with towns evocatively named things like “Bombay Beach.” That was before the lake started to stink.

Initially, the lake was predicted to evaporate in a matter of decades, and it probably would have if not for the regular flow of new water into the basin from farm irrigation. According to the state’s Salton Sea website, irrigation runoff accounts for up to 90 percent of water flow into the lake. The runoff from these large farms is essential industrial waster – laden with contaminants from fertilizer, pesticides, and salt from the soil it flows across. More water every year evaporates from the sea, increasing the salinity and toxicity of the lake, only to be replaced with fresh runoff brimming with contaminants. This poison soup becomes fouler year after year, choking oxygen out of the water and leading to massive periodic fish die-offs. Visitors are wise to watch where they walk along the shoreline, as an obstacle-course of fish and bird carcasses and skeletons and cement-thick mud line the water’s edge.

Isn't it beautiful: Ironic grafitti points out the ironic state of things in Bombay Beach - this former resort town is half flooded and dissolving in the salty water.

Of late, Imperial Valley farmers have had less bountiful supplies of water as more and more water is diverted from the area to satisfy the growing demands of San Diego’s expanding population. Thus, less runoff flows into the sea. This would seem to be a blessing, as the runoff that has fed the lake is less than environmentally friendly. Instead, it brings us to the great, frustrating catch-22 of the Salton Sea: although it is caused by an environmental disaster, much greater environmental havoc would result from its destruction.

After years of dumping poison into the water, the remains if an evaporated sea would spell catastrophe to the region. The waters recede a little each year to reveal a fallout of salt, nitrates and pesticides that one day – if nature is allowed to run its course and evaporate the sea into the dry desert air unchecked– will rain down on the rest of the valley and its unnaturally sustained farms in a toxic dust storm.

Plans have been proposed over many years to rescue the Salton Sea, but they all require an investment of money and water that the state – and the environment – simply cannot afford. It seems it will merely go the way of that first compound of abandoned houses, and there’s something refreshing about that conclusion, a moral to the story that we will hopefully, finally, learn from. Nature has a way of putting things back in their proper places. Just wait and it’ll come around. The people in the region, however, may not fare so well.