

Centroid Exploration by Dr. Subtle, Beta Orionis
June 3rd, 2009 4:58 PM
Brought you by Doctor Subtle && Beta Orionis
160 miles from the shores of Long Beach, California, the remains of a once hopping resort town lay. That place is Salton City. Initially, Dr. Subtle and I considered driving out to El Centro, the true center of nowhere in particular, but we decided otherwise, and it proved to be the better choice. At this point in time, you would never recognize Salton's existence without knowing some of its history.
What happened there? Why was there a whole subdivision worth of winding residential roads named for every positive nautical image imaginable, now just dust and asphalt?
We came to Salton City already knowing those answers, but ill prepared for the eerie, disturbing reality of the place.
H I S T O R Y
Salton City was one of a half-dozen tourism-driven resort towns circling the once-famous Salton Sea, in the heart of Imperial Valley, a fault-created rift that digs a long trough through Southern California.

The movement of the San Andreas, and the corrosponding rise and fall of various Southern California landforms, is also, at the geologic scale of time, responsible for the changes in outlet of the Colorado River, which once ran out to Santa Barbera, but now runs south into Mexico.
When colonizing SoCal, much was done to levy up the River, so that more water could be directed towards the new settlements of Los Angeles, San Diego, etc.
But in 1905, heavy rains and snows in states upriver caused the levy to break catastrophically, letting the bulk of the river flow into the Salton Sink, which prior to that had been the flat, salty former-sea-bottom of a once-vast inland sea. For three years the river reconstituted at least a part of that vast sea, destroying the town of Salton but making a sudden and quite salty inland ocean, an ocean that due to it's relative height below sea level had no outlet.
For thirty years, between the 20s to the 50s, it was stocked with fish and brought thousands of bird species into the ecologically scarce SoCal desert region.
But as the Colorado River was brought back under control and used to fuel agriculture across the valley, farm runoff began to be the main source of input to the sea. In addition to causing floods that sometimes harmed the surrounding communities, the agricultural runoff also slowly poisoned the sea. Each year it gets 1% saltier, and immeasurable agrochemicals enter it, as well as all manner of bacteria.
Some time in the 60s it became unavoidably apparent that it had become a pollution-sink, and by 1986 it was all but abandoned as a tourist center.
It is now saltier than the Pacific Ocean, and only the Tilapia fish still survives, though thanks to frequent algal blooms, they wash up on shore in the thousands periodically.
There have been repeated years where the poisioned lake has killed the whole ecosystem, even claiming the lives of migrating birds who eat bacteria-poisioned fish and drink chemical-laced water. They take off again, only to die mid flight.
The system gets more unstable every year, and with it's bottom nearly the lowest point on the Continent, there is no easy way to drain the sea and return the land to it's pre-1905 state, to the time before we started fucking around with things.
T H E V I S I T
When we finally arrived, only a sign assured us that we had.

To get to that dock, we had to drive zig-zag through what was once a residential subdivision. The road structure still reflects this- roads with names like "Mirror Lake Ave" and "Sea Nymph Ave" twist and turn, slowing traffic the way one might want to in a residential neighborhood. What made this surreal was that there was nothing- dirt and scrub plants, maybe- between most of the roads. The whole town is a big, emtpy plain, criss-crossed by a maze of crumbling asphalt.

The city even has a motel, although it's beyond us who'd travel to this city specifically and stay here.





bones:

barnacles and bones


dying

dead




Even worse, as I stooped closer, I realized that those blooms really must be frequent, as the fish lay on an existing layer of clean, dry, bleached bones at least 4 inches thick in places.

In spite of all the detritus, the strangest thing about this already weird area, and indeed the biggest contributor to the unsettling feeling that grew the longer we lingered, was the silence. When we stood on the boney shoreline, dead fish littering the beach the way beer cans litter other ones, the only sound was the birds and the small lapping waves and the wind. So it was in silence we quickly departed, bid the ghosts adieu, and hoped to hell they didn't follow us.

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Excellent!
No scorpions. I had hoped for snakes, but no luck. We did see a Desert Hare and some mice though.
I hadn´t seen something this Biome in a long time, really first class.
you know, I hadn't thought of that. I guess just because it's listed under Bart. Thanks though!
Somehow whenever SFØ meets, the salton sea gets brought up.
Oh, yeah, and this task is awesome. Salton sea's the best post-apocalyptic national whateverthefuck there is.
So... I've been slightly obsessed (off-and-on) with the Salton Sea since reading an article about it in National Geographic a few years ago. And having been there (what can I say, I forced a road trip), I can say that while their pictures are prettier, yours are much, much more accurate.
Wait a sec, did you just one-up National Geographic? On accuracy? I THINK SO.
haha! I haven't read that article, but it's an interesting (and slightly disturbing) note!
It is a bit disturbing. They have all these shots of people floating in it (ew), these otherworldly trees growing in it, people standing around it... and only one shot of Fishdeath. The article is here, although I don't believe they have all the pictures from the magazine up. I mean, the article's spot-on (I can't picture NG settling for anything less, c'mon), but the pictures... eh.
I see! I guess the starkness of reality just wasn't up to their visually-stunning standard. Too N.G. circa 1970? Makes me wonder what other modern articles have similarly misleading photographic elements.
It's like something out of Fallout,
As I read I imagined distorted fifties crooning from the bakelite zombie radio that just wouldnt die.
Did you see any rad-scorpions?