Odd in the Desert: Salvation Mountain, Salton Sea, California

Drive southwards along the east shore of the Salton Sea in southern California, pass a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) checkpoint (yes, they have a new bureaucratic name), turn left at the sign for Slab City, and you come to a man-made mountain. This is the famous Salvation Mountain, the life work of Leonard Knight (1931–2014), who made this edifice of straw bales and adobe mud, covered with gallons (tons?) of paint. According to Wikipedia, the edifice "encompasses numerous murals and areas painted with Christian sayings and Bible verses, though its philosophy was built around the Sinner's Prayer."

There are plenty of painted artifacts here, with Love, God, and other homilies in bold colors. These remind me of the folk art at Margaret's Gro, on North Washington Street, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. That, too, was built by a preacher as his Temple to the Lord.

It surprised me that this is a popular wedding photography site. Well, why not? But the light is harsh; the couple this day needed an assistant to hold a sun diffuser.

Drive a couple of blocks through Slab City, round a corner, and you reach East Jesus. According to Wikipedia, 

"Slab City, also called The Slabs, is largely a snowbird community in the Sonoran Desert located in Imperial County, California, 156 miles northeast of San Diego within the California Badlands, and used by recreational vehicle owners and squatters from across North America. It took its name from concrete slabs that remained from the abandoned World War II Marine Corps barracks of Camp Dunlap." 

The marine base closed in 1956, and the land status is a bit murky but likely belongs to the State of California. The residents of Slab possibly could be classified as squatters, but they certainly are creative ones. "East Jesus is an experimental, sustainable and habitable art installation" made from recycled materials and discarded electronics. Interesting stuff; it is well worth a drive to the Salton Sea if you are passing through southern California. Well, skip mid-summer, when the temperature is well over 100° F.

I took these photographs on Fuji 200 film with my Yashica Electro 35CC compact rangefinder camera. I scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i film scanner using Silverfast Ai software.

Travels on the Mother Road, Route 66 - Part 3, the Mohave Desert

Dear readers, this is Part 3 of our trip on the Mother Road. Head east from Barstow, California, and you really get into desert terrain. I was there in April, and the weather was gorgeous - brilliant clear sky and daytime temperature of about 25° C or 75° F. Just fantastic. But summer can often have midday temperatures above 110° F, so be warned.

Daggett is about 10 miles east of Barstow on the National Trails Highway. Although it is just off of I-40, the town has a sleepy feeling of time forgotten. The Desert Market was there to serve Route 66 travelers decades ago. The 1890 building still serves as a convenience store.

Some of the local gents were imbibing early morning. They were thrilled to talk about Route 66 and tell me about sights to check out.

The Stone Hotel was in business at the beginning of the 20th century during the borax boom. It is an example of the type of accommodations that were available a century ago for travelers crossing the desert. Borax is an evaporate (mined from nearby dry lakes) that has many industrial uses in detergents, cosmetics, and enamel glazes. According to the Route 66 Adventure Handbook, John Muir frequented the Stone.

This is the odd house with a ski chalet roof. It opened in 1926 as a visitors' center and gasoline station, the same year that Route 66 was formally designated.

Head east out of Daggett, and you are really in the desert. The National Trails Highway follows close to I-40, then swings south away from 40 at Ludlow. There is not much 66 memorabilia until you reach Amboy.

Roy's Motel & Cafe is an iconic piece of 1950s Route 66 architecture, and the sign is famous.

The lobby has been preserved right out of the 1950s, complete with an entertainment center. The Adventure Handbook said new owners were planning to revive the site, but I did not see any guests. I was hoping to take some film photographs with my big Fuji GW690II camera, but the shutter locked up right in the porch at Roy's. So, no film this trip.

It does not get much stranger than this. A couple miles east of Amboy, in dry dusty desert, I saw two gorgeous marble dragons. It looks like a subdivision had been laid out, and possibly the dragons (lions?) were intended to guard the entrance. A gated community in the desert? With no water? And the residents would commute to???

I took a diversion to Palm Springs before driving to Amboy. Palm Springs is pretty funky; the people are friendly, the setting spectacular, and the restaurants excellent. And if you are really rich, there is some amazing high-end property you could buy (Russian billionaires have homes here). Not too far south of Palm Springs is the Salton Sea, which is worth a visit if you want to see what environmental degradation on a grand scale looks like. Please click the links to see Bombay Beach, Bombay Beach in black and white, and Salton City (non-city).

We will continue east on Route 66 in the next installment. Please stay tuned.

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.