Salton Sea

12/22/08
Salton Sea is the largest lake in California. It’s a saltwater lake; like Pyramid Lake, like Mono Lake, Salton Sea is endorheic, lying at the bottom of the Salton Basin. The Salton Basin bottoms out at 226 feet below sea level, almost as low as Death Valley’s Badwater, and significantly larger in size.

Salton Sea State Recreation Area offered an official fee-campground, but I opted for a free spot in a parking lot running between the highway and the beach. A half dozen RVS were spread out along the lot and I pulled up to a picnic table I could call my own. I examined the signs for rules about camping on the beach and saw nothing, so I pitched my tent on a beach comprised entirely of sea shell fragments, and set about having a very pleasant afternoon sitting and reading in the hazy sunshine in my t-shirt, no wind, on an enormous and very lovely lake shore. It was a bit odd having just fled a snowstorm earlier that morning.

seashell beach

The Sea was absolutely filled with birds, more birds than I‘d ever seen. The most dominant was the American White Pelican, a huge bird that congregates at the lake in the tens of thousands. The other major players were gulls; a very small diving duck; and a tern like bird. Several hundred Brown Pelicans, a threatened species, winter here, and I saw quite a few of these fly by. They did not seem to land on the water, at least in my sight. I saw some cormorants; a few white egrets; and a sandpiper-looking thing. I am obviously no kind of birder and was unable to identify many of the smaller birds even with my Sibley's and my binoculars, but I was happy to identify a Black-necked stilt. It was a nice looking bird and fun to watch.

some birds

Pelicans fly gracefully. They float gracefully too. But they are not the most noble of creatures. In fact, they are street thugs. My first impression was that they spent their time simply chasing away the terns. A tern would land and several pelicans would lumber very ungracefully toward it and most of the time the tern would flee. I began to conclude that rather than looking for food themselves the pelicans were watching the smaller birds search for food and then pouncing on them should they show signs of success. That was my hypothesis at any rate. The pelicans didn’t seem to get anything out of these muggings - if the tern did not flee the pelicans wouldn’t do anything to it - and the net effect seemed to be preventing hard working birds from eating at all. I suppose this cannot be so.

I was able to read outside until 7:00PM, taking shelter behind my tent from a rising north wind. It was a peaceful and lulling scene. The Santa Rosa Mountains, dusted with new snow, rose above the opposite shore, very much resembling the Olympic Range from Seattle at sunset. The evening light made the pelicans look like huge musical notations floating around. Venus and Jupiter were still at it. A surprising amount of light from the west side of the lake indicated the presence of a small city.

The next morning was fine as well. The pelicans were beautiful in the low morning sun. The air was very still, just slightly warm, the sky light blue. I’d yet to see any boats on the water. I hadn’t seen the moon lately either, but then early-mid morning I did, somewhat less than half, presumably waning. A ranger came by and told me camping on the beach was not allowed. He was nice about it. He said it wasn’t posted because tent campers never camped there, I was the first one he‘d seen. So I had to move back off the shells to the dried mud off the parking lot.




The whole scene was a somewhat bi-polar. In front of me, to the west, was beauty itself: white beach, blue water, sea and air filled with more birds than I’ve ever seen, snow-dusted mountains in background. Behind me to the east was another story. Directly adjacent to the campground, a transportation corridor runs from Mexico into California. A two-land highway with traffic that didn’t let up even at night, much of it heavy trucks from Mexicali, and a busy train line whose traffic actually seemed to peak at 3:00 AM. During the days on the beach, the closer to the water the better, I could generally forget the transportation corridor. But the nights were restless with NAFTA disturbing my dreams.

Other than the fact that it was below sea level and has camping, Salton Sea was on my itinerary due to Richard Misrach's photographs of diving boards into nowhere and gas station signs emerging from the water. I had expected to go searching for these scenes, but lethargy had gotten the upper hand. I wandered over to the visitors center and gathered some information pamphlets, poked around the boat docks, and then shuffled around the Ironwood Nature Trail trying to guess what the numbered trail posts were meant to indicate as I had not seen any trail guide match them. It was basically a walk in the sun through desert scrub, and for the first time in quite a while I was a little bored.



So I retreated to my camp for some advanced Salton Sea Studies. It is a very complicated place, and to my lights a very significant place. One of the goals of my trip was to try and grasp the Colorado River watershed and all it entails, and I was surprised to learn that the Salton Sea provided an oblique but far from trivial introduction. For when I descended from the windmills near Gorgonio Pass down toward Salton Sea, I had in fact entered the enormous Colorado River basin. Sort of.

The Salton Sea does not seem to be part of the Colorado River watershed. It doesn’t drain to the Colorado, it doesn’t drain anywhere. It is the bottom of a sink. It sends no water anywhere but up into the air or down into the ground. Nor does the Colorado River flow into Salton Sea, at least in any direct way. But this is a historical aberration. Not all that long ago - five million years or so - Salton Sea really was a sea, part of the Gulf of California, whose seawater extended into Coachella Valley to lap at the feet of what would someday be Palm Springs. The Colorado River was not yet the Colorado River; it had not yet excavated Grand Canyon and was flowing to no one knows where for sure - but that is a story for later in my trip.

Eventually though, it did become the Colorado River, and poured down to the Gulf of California with a Grand Canyon’s worth of sediment, laying down an immense delta that soon rose high enough to cut off the flow of the Gulf of California, turning its northern extension into a dry, inland, below sea-level basin - the Salton Trough. Dry that is except for once every couple hundred years or so when the wild Colorado River would rage out of its channels, cut a new trench to the Salton Trough, and turn its lower elevations into the Salton Sea. In time the river would return to its normal course, and over the ensuing decades the water in the Salton Trough would evaporate and the basin would remain dry until the next time the river ran amuck.

Salton Sea owes it's current incarnation to an early 20^th-century effort to intentionally divert water from the Colorado River to irrigate the desert of the Salton Trough and turn it into an agricultural wonderland renamed the Imperial Valley. For a few years this worked spectacularly. But the Colorado River still ran wild then - Hoover Dam had not yet been built - and after letting peoples hopes rise, the river basically mauled the simple waterworks, plowed through the new fields, and refilled the Salton Sea.

Rather than let it evaporate, the various governments decided to 1) build Hoover Dam to prevent this flooding from recurring, and 2) allow the surviving farmers to use the Salton Sea as an agricultural drainage basin, and 3) encourage development of Salton Sea as a resort community in the desert. People built retirement communities and resorts, and stocked the lake with exotic fish to attract sports fishing. This too worked quite well for a while, but it had an inherent flaw. 97% of the inflow to Salton Sea now came from agricultural runoff, and since the lake didn‘t drain, the cumulative impact of fertilizer, decomposing fish, and increasing salt content caused intense eutrophication and epic fish die-offs, making one stinky lake, and drastically reducing its recreational and residential appeal.

So most of the development dried up and blew away, leaving - Birds! Salton Sea is now one of the country's great birding areas, a critical resting spot on the Pacific Flyway. A happy ending? Alas no. For while the Salton Sea lures loads of birds, it is also an unhealthy ecosystem with an occasional flare up of toxins and enormous fish die-offs, luring birds, including nearly entire populations of threatened species such as the Brown Pelican, into a potential mortality sink.

The state of California, the local Salton Sea Authority, and the US Department of Fish and Wildlife all work at developing a plan to save, or salvage, Salton Sea. The most obvious solution would be to add fresh water but fresh water is precious indeed. Cleaning up the agriculture runoff would be very expensive, and if the farmers were to clean it up the water would have a lot more value in San Diego than it would in the Salton Sea. Various more technological solutions have been proposed, but all are expensive and with the economy hitting the skids, these have become less attractive.

So enlightened I set off on a side trip through the Imperial Valley to the city of Brawley for supplies. On the way back, I came upon my first Border Patrol checkpoint. I assumed I would just have to show my driver's license but instead the officer asked me where I was going. This threw me. I knew he didn't want the entire itinerary of my trip but that was what was going through my head. I managed to stutter out "Salton Sea", and that was apparently good enough. Meanwhile a couple other guys had been peering through the windows into my car, which was an extraordinary mess. I was obviously not smuggling people, at least any still alive, but I was afraid they would see it as a cover for drug smuggling and they'd call in the dogs and pull it apart. But the looks on their faces suggested they found me entertaining instead; it would seem that wildly unkempt old guys in heavily weighted-down subcompacts don't fit the cartel's profile.

 Salton Sea was a lovely respite, but I didn’t think it would be a good place for Christmas, and as it was now December 19, I needed to find somewhere that was. So after three desultory days I had the urge for going. One of the RV neighbors left me a little plate of Christmas goodies, some of which I could even eat. I was off to the Yuma, Arizona, and the "real" Colorado River.