SaltonSea Map

The Salton Sea fills the bottom of the Salton Sink, a long desert trough in southeastern California where the San Andreas Fault comes to its end. The lake is roughly 35 miles long and 15 miles wide, and its surface lies more than two hundred feet below sea level, with the Coachella Valley to the north and the Imperial Valley to the south, its farm grid ruled across the lower right of this map. For centuries the Colorado River swung into this basin and out again, filling it as ancient Lake Cahuilla and then letting it dry. In 1905 the river broke through a set of irrigation canals and poured into the sink for nearly two years. What it left behind is the modern sea, kept alive since then by farm runoff and now far saltier than the Pacific.

The shoreline towns grew up in the resort years of the mid-century, when boaters and anglers came by the thousands: Desert Shores and Salton City on the west shore, Bombay Beach, below the state recreation area, on the east. Past Niland, on the concrete pads of an abandoned military base, is Slab City, and at its edge Salvation Mountain, the adobe hill Leonard Knight spent decades painting with his message of God’s love.

At the south end, the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge and the Imperial Wildlife Area hold some of the richest bird life in the West: white pelicans, eared grebes by the tens of thousands, burrowing owls along the canal banks, and the endangered desert pupfish in the shoreline pools. Since a water transfer began sending the valley’s runoff to the coast, the sea has been shrinking, and the exposed lakebed has become a source of dust.

My Travels on the Salton Sea

I kayaked by headlight to Bombay Beach before dawn, landing on a beach made of tilapia bones, in Bombay Beach Sunrise on the Atomic Paradise. In Death and Salvation on the Salton Sea, I brought Leonard Knight a Cactus Cooler at Salvation Mountain, and returned twenty years later to see what the sea had become.