Below Low

The thirty five mile long Salton Sea clings to life at 226 feet below sea level.  A watery inland sea that was caused by a Colorado River flood in 1905 the Salton’s salinity increases each year and when summer temperatures reach 115 a noxious sulfur odor wafts as far as Los Angeles.  Once a playground of the famous, Guy Lombardo set several speedboat records there, the Salton Sea has descended into shallow salty death rattle.  What’s left is a population on the fringes of society on the shores of a lake it can’t use but with the faintest glimmers of the inland lake’s brief heyday.

 

 

 

The Salton, it seems fitting, sits astride the San Andreas Fault.  If one terminal illness doesn’t kill it another certainly will.  A waiting for the apocalypse Eden housed in shambling mid-century houses and oxidized 1940’s trailers.