When we left Palm Springs, CA, we pointed south towards the border to the legendary Slab City, a 90 minute or so drive, and along the way we unintentionally passed this big ass beautiful fucking lake, so naturally, being hedonists with only self-imposed deadlines, we stopped to check it out.
The Salton Sea is the biggest lake in the state of California, and the 19th biggest lake in the United States. But it wasn’t ever supposed to be there. Jumping head first down another timelapse black hole, here’s how it went down.
There were these farmers in southern California that needed water for their farms, back in the late 1800’s. The Colorado River nearby, that famous river that cut the Grand Canyon down to size, it had dumped millions of acres of lush and fertile silt and soil in the desert valley for millions of years, but there was a real dearth of available water in the constantly changing desert. So along came this civil engineer, a cat named Charles Rockwood, and in the early 1900’s he had the bright idea to have irrigation canals built from the river to the farmlands. Genius, really. Problem is, the man he contracted to build the canals didn’t do it right, so the silt and soil from the raging river kept plugging up the works.
Facing mounting pressure from thirsty farmers to fix the faulty canals, Rockwood made an infamous decision that damn near changed the river forever, and built an accidental giant ass lake that is called a sea. Rockwood didn’t have permission or permits to build the breach in the river he had built, and he didn’t have any floodgate safety measures installed, so the Colorado River began to send more water into the canals than the farms needed, and the excess water began to fill the Salton Sink, the second lowest point below sea level in the U.S. behind Death Valley.
Comrades, the Salton Sink sits directly over the San Andreas Fault, and contains five inactive volcanoes. And these aren’t even the scariest parts of the fucking story of this ghostly beautiful body of water.
As the Colorado River swelled with rain and snow melt months later, it began to roar and cut into and away at that manmade breach, and after a year it got to a point that experts began to worry that the course of the Colorado River was going to be permanently altered to drain into this quickly growing lake forever. It took them two years to plug that breach, and in that time the Colorado River emptied itself completely, twice, into the now named Salton Sea. They say at its worst, the gaping breach created a 100 ft waterfall.
Of course, with the River preserved, and the farmers now having access to the 19th biggest lake in the U.S., crops flourished. The Sea became a resort destination. Fish were stocked. Beaches built. Migratory birds began to flock there in the thousands to picnic and rest on their trips north and south. It could have been the best success story in agricultural history, and indeed, ole Charles Rockwood is hailed as the godfather of the Valley, his name on streets, schools and parks everywhere.
But you know, people being people, and the desert being the desert, shit went tragically south. The farmers over farmed and over fertilized so they could maximize their income. The fertilizers and pesticides drained into the lake, and the desert sun and sand started to turn the poisons into salt, making the water too salty for all those fish, so they died. No shit. Like 97% of hundreds of thousands of fish are gone.
When the fish died because the water was too nasty and salty, the birds stopped coming, and the beaches lined several feet deep for years with dead fish carcasses. And then the desert started drying the damn lake up, because that’s what deserts do, and the exposed lake bed started to get swirled up in the desert’s legendary dust storms, and the toxic dust is still plaguing the local population with cancers, asthmas, and exorbitant rates of respiratory ailments. They say that when the winds howl you can smell the rotten egg of the polluted lake all the way to the coast, 90 miles away.
Sonny Bono, when he was a Congressman, tried to tackle the issue of the deadly and dying lake, and after his death the lake became a hippie cause of the decade in the 90’s. It’s still dead and shrinking more. California has invested billions upon billions to address the issues, yet they persist to a point where the giant lake was completely deserted and damn near all alone by itself when we dropped by. Imagine coming upon a giant fucking lake in the middle of the desert. Mountains stand craggy and proud behind it. A fog like sheen glows off the surface floating up towards the yellow sun. And there’s nobody there. Not a single car or other human can be seen or heard anywhere. Walking up to the beach, across hundreds of yards of white salt encrusted sand, coyote and bear tracks everywhere, people tracks non-existent, save for your own. You get down to blue crystal waters that float with little to no life within. Fuck, the place is stunning. The sky bluer than boy baby blankets. But no matter how beautiful, it was one of the eeriest feeling places I’ve ever stopped to visit.
There’s beaches there still. They say it’s safe to swim in, and I suppose many still do. And there are sustained efforts and collaborations between government engineers, and descendants of the indigenous tribes of the area, working to filter and restore the lake, but there’s also studies that say the lake may be half gone, and the toxic dust 100x worse by 2045. So who knows?
And even more terrifying to a simple brained man like me, they’ve discovered a giant trove of lithium sitting under that lake area, and giant deposits of it inside the “mud pot” volcanoes there. Lithium is desperately needed to make batteries for electric cars, and other renewable energy sources. And the billionaires are lining up, and investing millions of dollars in hopes of figuring out how to mine it. Digging up a dead lake that’s full of volcanoes and sitting on the San Andreas Fault? What could possibly go wrong here? When I told Jess this info I’d learned about the area she said, “that’s how it’s gonna go. They’re gonna keep chipping away at Southern California until it really does fall away into the ocean.”
But I’ll tell you, if you’re driving by, you ought to stop and look around. It’s a hell of a gorgeous fucking view to sit and marvel at, and pray for the forgiveness of the best of our kind, the ones that brazenly solved one issue and caused a million others that we’re still figuring out today. And don’t worry about the heebie jeebies that follow you on down the road when you leave. Salvation Mountain is only 40 minutes away, and the desert only gets stranger the farther you drive.
Love,
Dan
ps. if you haven’t picked up on this yet, I’m leaning more towards a “write for tips” kind of style, learned from the artist friends I met on Venice Beach. They’re gonna hang out and play and sing and paint, even if their tip buckets stay emptier than a republicans heart. I’m gonna write even if no one reads, but if you dig the work, and you got it, consider a little tip to keep the factory poet rolling. Or if you read something you like, tell someone. Namaste.
