Wandering Around: Salton Sea State Recreation Area

Feb. 10, 2014

We arrived here about 2 weeks ago, just after a 3 day 'vacation' (from boondocking) at the Oasis Palms RV resort in nearby Thermal, CA. Met a few other Canadians at the Resort, attended a happy hour gathering one afternoon, soaked in the hot tub, did laundry, played ping pong. Also loaded up on tangerines and grapefruits, which we could pick at our campsite, as they grew on trees throughout the Resort. Most were delicious! Generally, we just restocked and cleaned up before we headed out to our next dry campsite. We were headed for Anza Borrego Desert State Park, 600,000 + acres of free desert camping. However, the Salton Sea was only a few miles out of our way, so Leah insisted we check it out. As we drove the last few miles to the park, we experienced that now-familiar mixture of excitement and tension: Will it be beautiful, crowded, expensive, cheap, clean, noisy, quiet? And of course we were hooked the moment we stopped at the Salt Creek primitive camping area. And the price? $8.00 a night. Not bad for right on the beach!

Our site (near center of photo) at Salt Creek Campground, Salton Sea State Park

Here's a photo looking from the beach back at the trailer:

Of course, not all was ideal: there was a highway behind us, and running parallel to the highway, railroad tracks. However, the highway was not busy, but trains did go by several times a day (and night). That gave me pause, but, interestingly, the train noise turned out to be more like a romantic accent than an irritant. Another possible irritant was the occasional whiff of something rotting. Didn't happen often enough to chase us away, but did occasionally intrude. It would likely be far worse in the summer heat.

And the migratory birds and the sunsets more than made up for it:

Great Blue Heron off our campsite, Salt Creek primitive campground, Salton Sea State Park, California

A bit of background on the Salton Sea

The Salton Sea is really just a huge accidental lake created in the early 1900s when the Colorado River broke through a poorly built levee and flooded the Salton Sink, a valley 200 feet or so below sea level. The river's full volume flowed into the sink for 16 months before engineers eventually stopped it. By then, the resulting Salton Sea was 40 miles long by 20 miles wide. For a while, the Sea provided a convenient inland lake that became a major irrigation source, as well as a water playground for boaters, fisherman, and water skiers. Naturally, towns sprang up along the shore to cater to the sudden influx of tourists. However, the new Sea had no outlet to the ocean and was only fractionally replenished by agricultural runoff. As a result, its water gradually evaporated, its shoreline shrank away from the new towns, and the increasing salinity killed most of the fish, causing a rotten smell along the beach. No longer situated on an inviting water playground, the Salton Sea towns themselves began to shrink as tourists stayed away. The towns also began to rot, since the Sea had a habit of flooding low-lying areas--the very ones closest to the beach where all the restaurants and tourist services were.

Bombay Beach is one of those towns. When we visited, we saw that a dike had been built to protect the part of the town closest to the shoreline that hadn't already been ruined by the repeated flooding. And though it does keep the water out, the dike couldn't bring the tourists back. And so today the whole town looks post-apocalyptic: roughly 10 or 15 square blocks of abandoned, dilapidated, or rundown trailers or shacks with dirt and sand yards, rusting cars and car parts, broken fences. And no one on the streets. I'd say at least 25% of the houses are abandoned: some boarded up, some falling down, others rotting in place. Virtually all the buildings seem to be from the 40s to the 70s...very little newer construction, though there were a couple of relatively prosperous and well-kept places.