Salton Sea part I - Bombay Beach

So for Raquel's birthday we did a road trip for some photographic fun.  The Salton Sea http://goo.gl/maps/XHH6 is an inland sea in southern California that was originally formed by the Colorado River emptying silt into the Gulf of California, filling in a lot of land. In the early 20th Century the Colorado river flooded through some irrigation channels and flowed into this low lying (now below sea level) area, filling the Imperial Valley, submerging the town of Salton and creating the Salton Sea. Intermittent flooding continued until the Hoover Dam controlled the flow of the Colorado. In the 1920s the area became a popular recreation area but decades of agricultural run off and rising salinity (now saltier then seawater) have seen massive environmental decline which has led to significant social decline. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_sea

Things that were once used but are now abandoned is one of my favourite photographic subjects...They day was fantastic with great high level clouds and not too strong light. The polarizing filter did most of the hard work; I'm fairly happy with a few of the results.

Bombay Beach
The first stops were on the east side of the sea. The town of Bombay Beach was the main attraction, and I use that term somewhat loosely - with abandoned buildings on shore decaying away, dead fish, discarded trash and a tired desolate town just inland with very few signs of life.