Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Salton Sea part III - Southern end and Salton City

After lunch we headed around the southern tip of the Salton Sea. Down at the bottom is the Sonny Bono wildlife reserve with a surprisingly large amount of bird life, considering the nasty state of the water. Sadly my telephoto lens wasn't up to zooming several hundred yards away....but William spotted a cool owl on the side of the road as we sped by - it was kind enough to hang around for a photo opportunity.

Heading north along the western side of the sea we visited Salton City - another fairly desolate town. It had clearly been laid out with the expectation of a huge booming resort town - throughout the place there were roads with power poles but no houses, or just one or two really old ones. There was a marina and a bunch of places that looked like they were set up for holiday frolickers but now they were all in decay and a pretty bad stench hung in the air.

I found the place profoundly sad, I think not because it wasn't all nice and shiny, but because a large contributor to the failure of the area is in fact runoff from agricultural land helping the water become toxic in parts (alagal blooms) and raising the salinity so much.



Salton City








On the way home we also found some dinosaurs - Rwarrr!

1 comment:

  1. It all looks like from a movie set! Great photo opportunity but I can imagine it a very sad place. It's amazing there is any wildlife there at all isn't it? And I wonder why the government would not take steps to clean up the run off. The owl looks super cool!:-) xoxo

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