Salton City, CA: The Party Where No One Came

The Salton sea is a endorheic rift lake located in southern California in Imperial and Riverside counties. It is shallow, saline, and fed by agricultural runoff. A few wadis (gullies) lead into the lake, but only flow after a rainstorm. The Sea was trendy and sophisticated in the 1940s, when Hollywood stars flocked to marinas and watched boat races. In recent decades, increasing salinity led to fish kills and severe environmental degradation, and the tourists stopped coming. Dust has led to serious air quality issues.

Salton City was an ambitious dream. When you look at aerial photographs, you see a grid of streets and think this must be a sizable community. But in fact, few of the streets were ever developed, and tumbleweeds blow over dusty pavement. According to Wikipedia, "The town was developed in the 1950s and established in 1958 primarily by M. Penn Phillips and the Holly Sugar Corporation as a resort community on the Salton Sea." But it was isolated and there were few local employment opportunities, leading to minimal development. Could the fact that the summer temperature was over 100 deg F be part of the story? (Of course, Palm Springs is hot, too, but it is higher altitude and close to mountains, and has a more sophisticated aura to it.).

The main excitement seems to happen at the Arco truck stop on California State Highway 86 at the junction with Marina Drive. Optimism: the sign says there are lots for sale. (Click any photograph to enlarge it.)

Cross Highway 86 and head east on Marina Drive, and the Alamo Restaurant welcomes you. Another good sign.

Oh oh, now it look a bit quieter. Where are the people?

The high school looks modern and clean, but it sits by itself in a rather lonely spot.

We found one lot with some habitation.

A sign said "Marina." Where was it? All we saw was sand. Even the palm trees looked lonely.

Another chance to buy some waterfront property.

This road was rip-rapped (protected with stone). Did it once serve as a levee during a time of higher water level? Bombay Beach, on the east side of the lake, also had levees.

Oh oh, some more of these unhappy palm trees.

This basin may have been the unhappy marina. The yachtsmen must have moved their boats away.

This says it all for poor old Salton City. But not all is lost; drive about an hour northwest to Palm Springs, and you can dine in a variety of excellent restaurants. Salton city is only 30 min, south of Interstate 10, so the next time you drive across country, take a short diversion and see the Salton Sea. Click the link for some photographs of Bombay Beach.

The day my daughter and I visited Salton City, storms had recently passed, so the sky had more texture than usual with high clouds. I used a Fuji X-E1 camera with a polarizing filter to darken the sky. I processed the Fuji raw files with PhotoNinja software and converted to monochrome with their red or orange filter emulations. On some frames, I slid the blue wavelengths slider to the left to create an almost black sky. Also, I cropped square as per the days when I used a Rolleiflex camera, with its 6×6 frame. On my next trip there, I will take my 4×5" camera and do real photography with Tri-X film.

Bombay Beach - Crumbling in Monochrome at the Salton Sea

Dear Readers, one of my readers suggested that the cross-processed photographs of Bombay Beach in my previous article looked a bit odd and that the Bombay really should be black and white. So let us try again. I did not have a real (film) camera with me, but I reprocessed many of the RAW files with DxO Filmpack 3 to simulate Kodak's famous Tri-X film.

Bombay Beach is a former resort/trailer court on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea, in Imperial county, California. To reach it, drive on California Highway 111 along the barren desert east of the Sea, and turn west on Avenue A.  

Well, it does not look too bad. There is a store and mailboxes. Human habitation, perhaps?

Oops, the view from Avenue A becomes a bit grim. To the north, beyond the one bush, is a dry and featureless plain.

To the south, well, it was trailer heaven once upon a time.

The gate leads to a sizable deserted parking lot at the plage. They were optimistic.

Continue to the end of Avenue A, and the levee protects the town from flooding. Drive up onto the levee, and the land beyond is a mess of twisted trailer and collapsed sheds. It looks like the debris I saw along the Mississippi coast after Hurricane Katrina, but the Salton Sea does not have hurricanes.  Very odd.

In the water, the pilings are encrusted with salt, and the beach sediment consists of fish bone rubble. 

At least someone had fun with this old chimney.

Back in town, Fifth Street was the waterfront (levee-front?) corniche. Maybe the graffiti is more interesting.

Turn back inland along Avenue G. Someone collected classic Volkswagen Beetles. Rather cool. Someone else collected classic tires. Less cool. 

The well-known western author, Harold Bell Wright, wrote a novel about the formation of the present Salton Sea, The Winning of Barbara Worth. My daughter borrowed it from her local library. Her opinion was that it is one of those novels that does not age well. It lacks the pace or writing style that modern readers find interesting, but it does give an interesting window into the attitudes of the day. The primary assumption of the characters in the book is that by "reclaiming" the desert and making it fertile and lush, they are somehow doing a great work for the world or for God. The desert was something that was "broken" and had to be fixed. It is rather shocking to think that this was the attitude that caused us to make huge alterations to the West, and that a mere 100 years can shift attitudes so drastically.

Also, Barbara inspires all the desert reclamation workers by her "pure essence of womanhood." Well, times have changed...

Harold Bell Wright wrote The Winning of Barbara Worth while living in the tower at the Holt House, on Olive Avenue in Redlands, California. He modeled the protagonist on his host, Mr. Holt. Wright was a pastor, and possibly when the church could no longer afford his services, Mr. Holt provided him a place to stay.

My daughter drove me to Bombay Beach, as she knows my photographic interests. The ground-level photographs were taken with a Fuji X-E1 digital camera, with RAW files processed with Adobe Camera Raw and DxO Filmpack 3.

Bombay Beach and the Salton Sea

Bombay Beach - it sounds so exotic. Is it a luxurious tropic resort? A coral island in the Andaman Sea? Well, not quite; it is a decaying, seedy resort on the shores of the Salton Sea in southern California.

Look at the aerial photograph of the eastern side of the Salton Sea. Bombay Beach is the rectangle in the center right. It is only about an hour drive from Palm Springs. This was a semi-trendy resort in the 1940s, but fish kills and environmental degradation of the Salton Sea largely killed the town. Once upon a time, Hollywood celebrities came to the Salton Sea to water ski and enjoy the winter sunshine. Not any more.

The mental_floss web page is less charitable

"It's a 10-by-10-block square of squat houses and mobile homes that was somebody's idea of paradise back when the town was incorporated in 1929. A beachy getaway 150 miles from the Pacific, it was supposed to be Palm Springs with water -- but decades of hyper-saline farm runoff and other problems turned the sea into a nightmare; plagued by fish and bird die-offs and outbreaks of botulism that leave its banks littered with corpses and its beaches smelling like hell, all but the hardiest tourists and investors had fled the scene by the late 60s. Even worse, the Salton began to overflow its banks, flooding the bottom part of town repeatedly. The remains of dozens of trailers and houses that couldn't be saved still sit rotting, half-buried in salty mud, along what used to be the town's most prized few blocks of real estate." 

Even the slate.com called it a "skeleton-filled wasteland." The setting attracts visitors interested in the post-apocalypse scenery. It would be a great setting for a zombie movie. There is a 2011 documentary named, "Bombay Beach," with music by Bob Dylan???

Drive on into town on Avenue A after turning off from California Hwy 111. Oh oh, it already looks like a place for urban decay photography.

The view north is a bit bleak.

But there is a shop and mailboxes, so there are some residents still here.

But continuing west on Avenue A, you do not see much evidence of active habitation. In this photograph, I think the box contains a swamp cooler. It is an old-fashioned air conditioner in which a fan blows air through a mist of water and cools via evaporation. In this climate, the humidity feels good.

The surrounding blocks are also a bit (just a bit) bleak.

 A road leads out past the levee to the lakefront. Was this a parking lot for beach-goers?

The lakefront is really rough, just scrap from former trailers and cottages.

Hmmm, someone was buried alive...

The beach is somewhat of a mess. The pilings are coated with salt, and the beach sediment consists of pulverized fish bones.

Back in town, Fifth Street is the waterfront esplanade (all right, the levee view esplanade). The graffiti is more interesting than the view.

On Avenue G, someone collected classic Volkswagen Beetles. At least they won't rust while awaiting concours restoration.

Finally, here is the official poster from the movie. It did well at independent movie festivals.

Not all is lost. Head east into the hills, and there are a number of modest resorts that attract Canadian visitors in the winter. This is Bashford's Hot Mineral Spa in Niland. The hot spring water flows into pools, where you can sit and absorb the mineral salts. If you are soaking at dusk, you see the swallows and bats swooping about and catching insects. It is very relaxing.

2014 Update

This is a late-1940s photograph from Desert Beach, from the Salton Sea Museum. The caption reads:

Skippers sail trim yachts, not subs, 40 fathoms below the Pacific on California's Salton Sea.

Desert Beach Yacht Club, 241 feet below sea level, welcomed the flyers with burning sands, 95 degree water and warm hospitality. A member of the American Power Squadron, the club holds speedboat races each fall. buoyancy of the salt-packed water makes for record-breaking runs.

Please click the link for a black and white version of Bombay Beach.

The aerial photograph was taken my my friend, Bill Birkemeier, from InTheLens.com. My daughter brought me to this great site (she knows my photographic interests). The ground-level photographs were taken with a Fuji X-E1 digital camera, with RAW files processed with Adobe Camera Raw and DxO Filmpack 3. The zombie-like atmosphere inspired me to experiment with color. The green-tone color frames were created by the cross-process emulation (i.e., E6 film processed in C41 chemicals). The red Volkswagen was faded blue, but with the Kodachrome intensity slider moved to 100%, the colors reversed. Rather cool.