The Salton Sea – Bombay Beach

I wandered back to the beach where I met this guy on a big Harley Davidson.  He handed me his phone and asked me to take his picture on the beach.  I asked him if he wouldn’t mind if I got a photo of him.  It seemed that I had made his day,

This is the second part of my Salton Sea trip, the first being Slab City, about 20 miles south of Bombay Beach.

I found myself traveling around the American Southwest by myself, so I decided I wanted to check out the Salton Sea.  I’d heard all kinds of stories about, and seen a pretty good movie about twenty-five years ago, but I didn’t really know much about it.

I drove up from Yuma Arizona through California’s Imperial Valley to the shore of the Salton Sea.  You eventually come to a big sign on the highway for Bombay Beach.  A quick drive into the halfway abandoned town, past a couple of windowless bars, and up and over a set flood control berms get you to the lake shore.  The Salton Sea has no outlet, and years of drought have left the waterline half a mile from the entrance to now abandoned marina.  You can drive halfway down to the waterline on a hard packed beach coated with a thick layer of salt and what I later learned was lithium dust, a byproduct of the industrial fertilizer that saturates the farm irrigation run off that feeds the Salton Sea.

First impressions aren’t great.  It’s hot, humid when the wind is blowing off the lake, there are thumb sized biting flys, and the water smells like a sewage treatment plant.  Still, there’s a quirky charm.  As I walked around, a voice called out throw the back of an old cube van, with a think insect net over the back door, “hey, where’s your water”, I said I’m only going to be a minute, to which point the voice said “oh fuck that, here take this”, at which point an arm appeared from the curtain with an airline sized bottle of seltzer water.

The shore is littered with whimsical little art installations   It’s not the wall to art that you see at Slab City, but pretty cool.

Most of the art, and anything made of metal, was literally dissolving into piles of rust due to the salt and other caustic chemicals in the water.  Apart from the occasional surfboard, I didn’t see much evidence that anybody ever goes into the water.  Personally, I didn’t want to get anywhere near the water.

 

 

After I got off the beach, I went for a walk through the town.  I didn’t see many people actually living there.  The month before the temperatures had been in the mid 40C’s (110F), so most of the residents had left town for someplace cooler.  You could see spaces that were probably open around rave spaces.  You really get a strong end of the world vibe going, except here, whoever had survived the original catastrophe had then been taken by a later, even worse catastrophe.

 

I had seen some huge dust storms across the lake on the west shore of the Salton Sea that had been going for most of the afternoon, but now it started to blow in Bombay Beach, creating in effect a toxic dust storm of mostly salt and Lithium dust.  This video was shot from the entrance to what had once been the resort marina.  When I got to my hotel in Palm Dessert (the closest place to get a decent hotel, don’t even think of staying at any of the local places) my eyes were bright red and swollen, like I’d been huffing gasoline for the afternoon.

How to get there

I actually drove to Slab City from Lake Havasu Arizona through the Imperial Sand Dunes in California, but didn’t arrive until about 5:00 in the afternoon.  By the time I finished up in Slab City, it close to dark, so I drove back to Yuma Arizona, about ninety minutes southeast.  It’s a rough area and I didn’t feel like chancing any of the local hotels.  In the morning, I drove from Yuma to Slab City, then up the road about twenty miles north to Bombay Beach.  From there I drive another ninety minutes up to Palm Desert California.  You can camp for free pretty much anywhere in the desert, but I didn’t have any camping gear, and there’s no water, sewage, or electrical service.  On the positive side, it is free, although you do have to put up with the occasional toxic dust storm.  There were some hotels in some of the rural towns, but honestly, they were really scary looking, hence the trip up to Palm Desert.