One does not have to look hard to find scenes of urban blight and failed dreams around the globe. There is nothing though, that matches the magnificent desolation of a desert lake with mud volcanoes, shores filled with half submerged buildings, crumbling motels and rusting cars surrounded by tumble weeds. The Salton Sea provides a unique opportunity to see what America might have looked like if the Cuban Missile Crisis had erupted into a full-scale nuclear exchange -- scenes of communities filled with homes and businesses silently rusting and decaying for decades.

If it wasn't Soviet hydrogen bombs, how did this boom town die?

In 1905 heavy rainfall and snow melt turned the Colorado River into an unstoppable force, breaching a dike in California's Imperial Valley. Efforts to contain the flood continued for nearly two years. Meanwhile, the Salton Basin filled with the flood waters, submerging a Southern Pacific rail line, several salt mines (the reason for the region's name), and an Indian reservation (Torres-Martinez Indian land).

Over the years the newly formed sea attracted migrating water fowl, and enterprising fishermen successfully introduced several species of fish. Soon speed boats joined the fishing boats, and businesses sprung up to provide services to the crowds sunning themselves along the shoreline. Resort communities like Salton City were planned and a construction boom began. People bought homes and dined at the yacht club before the shimmering waters of the Salton. For a time, it seemed that the great flood had been transformed into a desert paradise.

Then catastrophe struck.

Without warning thousands of fish, dead and bloated, floated to the surface of the Sea and piled up along the shores. The stench of rotting mullet, corvina, sargo and tilapia quickly replaced the scent of wine at the yacht club. Beaches emptied, boats stayed in the marinas, and word spread about the disaster. As tourism waned, unregulated agricultural runoff caused floods, driving extra nails into the sealed coffin of the local economy.

Development halted and much of what was built was abandoned. Housing tracts with miles of roads and signs sat unused, marinas and boats fell into disrepair. Fish skeletons and tumble weeds replaced children and sand buckets on the beaches. Those who had purchased homes at the peak of the market found themselves trapped, unable to sell, in a slowly decaying time capsule.

Scientists went to work and discovered that an over abundance of nutrients from farm runoff provided a rich source of food for microorganisms, creating massive algal blooms that deplete the Salton of its oxygen. The fish die-offs have been so numerous that some areas of the shoreline consist of nothing but bony fragments. News reports of raw sewage and industrial waste brought by the New River (from neighboring Mexico) have added more nails to the submerged coffin of the local economy.

And so the Salton Sea sits as it has for decades, baking beneath a relentless sun. Talk of renewal comes and goes like the cars passing nearby on highway 86. With a global recession underway, this slowly decaying museum will continue its silent display of another time and another world that could have been.

RESOURCES

In addition the plethora of images available on the internet, the following may be of interest:

Salton Sea on Wikipedia

2006 Documentary website: Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea (Available at Netflix)

National Geographic article

YouTube video list

All images in this article were created by slworking2 and can be found at flickr.

All images are used under the Creative Commons 3.0 attribution-noncommercial-share alike license.