Tuesday, January 29, 2013 (Rockhouse Trail, Borrego Springs, CA)

After hiking some great areas over the last two days, today we decided we would take a drive to Salton City and check out the Salton Sea area.  The area is not very pretty and I was saddened by how very desolate it was.  The smell from all of the dead fish was terrible...I couldn't imagine what it must be like in the summer when the temps are well over 100F/38C!  I did some research on the Salton Sea to find out what had happened to the area.  Here is a snippet of what I learned...

"An accident spawned a lake. The lake fed water to millions of acres of farmland, and was a booming tourist trap that withered and died to leave a ghost town in its wake, all in the course of less than a century.
In the Sonoran Desert of southern California there is a valley that, like Death Valley, lies far below sea level. Geology suggests that this valley has been flooded and dried multiple times through the eons, but so far as US history goes, the Salton Sea came into being in 1905. 

It was an accident stemming from a canal that diverted water from the Colorado River to the agricultural area of the Imperial Valley. There was an overflow, an unplanned change of course, and an inland sea was reborn.

Fish were introduced to the lake, and by 1920 it was a major tourist destination....The irrigation played a large role, with fresh water pumped up out of the lake, run over the fields where it dissolved salts out of the soil, and then the excess water just flowed downhill, back to the lake to be used again. And salts weren't the worst of it: pesticides such as DDT and Agent Orange, and residues from fertilizers were mixed in too.

The saline levels had spawned an algae bloom—a sudden increase in phytoplankton algae—that had a profound smell … some described it as rotten eggs, or (and this is my favorite) “puke on a hot sidewalk”. By the seventies the resorts and tourists were history, and it was relegated to use only as irrigating and a wildlife preserve—the latter largely because of the population boom that devoured all the wetlands in the Los Angeles area, and left migrating birds no better place to nest. It turned out to be a less than ideal wildlife preserve; in the nineties there were two separate events of mass bird deaths at the lake."

We visited three communities along the western side of the Salton Sea.  First of all, Salton City...where the above pictures were taken.

The RV Park boat launch...that doesn't really make it to the lake...

An RV park that looks like it has mainly permanent residents...

There are tons of vacant lots...as low as $6,980.00.  Steve looked at the area on Google Earth...you can see all sorts of streets but no houses.

It looks like there are a couple of areas where new homes are being built and some of them are very nice. We thought this was a rather interesting house...

After Salton City, we continued onto Salton Sea Beach...the sign at the entrance to the community was the nicest part of the whole place...

Next we went to Desert Shores...it had some nicer areas with a number of water canals with homes.





Beautiful mountain backdrop...

The beach even looked a lot better in this particular spot...an Egret.

A Pelican...

And that ended our tour of the area...not very impressive, I'm afraid.  Too bad.

After stopping at a casino for diesel ($3.90/gal) and some propane, we headed home.  We had actually been gone for over 3 hours which really surprised us.  While we were on our tour, I received an email from our son, Rob...Mom and baby have been discharged from the hospital...YAY!  That means we can have a Skype call tonight!

It was so great seeing our little grandson, Conner...he is just perfect!  We also had a great chat with Rob, Angie, and Angie's Mom, Linda, who is there from their winter home in Texas.  This is Conner at 4 days old...isn't he precious?