The Salton Sea

The Salton Sea is my favorite environmental disaster, because it's entire history AND future is a disaster. Historically it was known that the Colorado River would flood over it's banks in some years, and water from the flooding would head towards the Salton Basin. But in 1905 an exceptional flood caused the river to overflow the headgates of the Alama Canal, an irrigation canal for farmland in the Imperial Valley. A levy breached, and the resulting torrent eroded a new channel so quickly that the entire flow of the Colorado River diverted into the dry basin. The rate of erosion was so fast that an 80 foot waterfall developed along the former canal path.

The river flowed into the basin for TWO YEARS before engineers were finally able to close the breach. After it was all over the sea had grown in size to cover over 525 square miles of former desert, including submerging the town of Salton. People said it would evaporate, but after 100 years it is still the largest lake in California. This accident, and subsequent flooding episodes in the Imperial Valley were major reasons for building the Hoover Dam decades later.

Everybody knew there should not be a big lake there, and with no source of replenishment, the lake would eventually dry up. But that didn't stop land prospectors from building several townsites and resorts all around the shoreline. The lake was stocked with fish, and soon massive numbers of birds started hanging out, to the point that the area was declared a national wildlife refuge.

The lake continued to dry up, becoming saltier all the time. The fish became locked in a crazy cycle of explosive reproduction followed by mass die offs due to algae blooms. The resorts failed, the towns were abandoned, and government spending was required to preserve all of that new wildlife that shouldn't have been around in the first place.

A few years ago i saw a great documentary on the place called "Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea". The documentary was filmed in 2004 and showed surreal scenes of salt encrusted, half submerged towns and glassy water right up to the highway. I visited the lake in the spring of 2011.

In the 7 years between seeing the film on tv and seeing the lake in person great quantities of water had disappeared. The lake is far from the road now, and i certainly didn't see any submerged towns, although i did find ruins that obviously had been flooded in the past. Water levels aside, the whole area is still very surreal.

The ironic thing about the lake is that for all the fuss about how to preserve it and how much money it will cost, there really isn't any thing to worry about. Even if it dries up completely will still be a lake in the future as it has in the past. In fact, it will be the actual ocean sometime in the future.

When i walked up to one of the smaller buildings here a big angry owl flew out the door and buzzed my head.

In one of the formerly flooded structures.

The sea sits directly on the San Andreas Fault, and the surface of the lake is 225 feet below sea level. In the distant past the whole basin was part of the Sea of Cortez. Over a few million years, the nearby Colorado River deposited so much sediment in it's ever growing delta (from it's excavation of the Grand Canyon), that it eventually damned up the whole width of the Sea of Cortez, creating what was then called Lake Cahuilla. But the basin, like the Sea of Cortez, is part of a rift valley system.

As California slowly shears by the rest of the country the valley is likely to once again be part of the nearby ocean (just as Africa's rift valleys will be part of the Indian Ocean). Even now, the area separating the basin from the ocean is just 30 feet above sea level. When it happens, the Sea of Cortez will reach all the way to Inyo California, not far from Palm Springs!

The water is brownish, foamy, and smells bad. Toxic stuff seems to be everywhere, yet, while we were here a family in a minivan pulled up and their daughters waded into the lake to play. The parents didn't seem to think anything of it. It was very unnerving.

The beach "sand" is literally made of fish bones.

I spent a couple of hours driving around the lake, but that was not enough time at all to see the multitude of strange things scattered throughout the area. We really only had time for two stops on our way to Anza Borrego, but those were full of things to look at.

Here is a youtube video that does a good job describing the place with good photography in just a few minutes: