If it smells like dead fish and is rife with abandoned, decaying buildings, why the heck would you want to go there?  Well, if it’s the Salton Sea, then despite its shortcomings, you should definitely go at least once!  It’s really eerily cool, and if you’re a photographer, it makes for some really strange pictures.

The backstory:  Salton Sea is a HUGE accidental lake.  In the 1900s, a storm overflowed the Colorado River and filled up this salt basin.  Voila, insta-lake in the middle of the desert.  Everyone thought, “Wow, this is great!” and it became a hopping tourist destination.  Unfortunately, because it’s an accidental lake, it doesn’t have any good way to drain.  Runoff from farms and the like just exacerbated the problem, adding toxins and even more salt.  As the sun beat down on the lake, some of the water evaporated, but all of the bad stuff just stayed put, becoming more and moreconcentrated.  San Diego took water from the Colorado River, so there wasn’t any water flowing in to even out the evaporation.  By the ’70s things were looking grim.  

And today it’s pretty much a ghost town.  The water is too toxic to support life, no one really vacations there anymore, and all of the old hotels and recreation areas are still there, just completely abandoned.   There are still some people who live in the area, but it’s no longer a boomtown, that’s for sure.  Despite all the decay, there’s something oddly beautiful about this place.  

That being said, you probably don’t want to stay the night there. It’s not too far from Joshua Tree, so you could combine two trips into one and camp at Joshua Tree, but you could also get from LA and back in one day without any hassle.  You basically take the 10 East for a long, long time until you get past Indio and then get on the 86 South.  Real directions are here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Bored On The Street, weekend, weird. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.