Yesterday I went out to the Salton Sea, an infamous body of water in southeast California. Once billed as being comparable to the French Rivera, now the Sea is considered grotesque (due to high saline content) and the water un-swimmable. (It is safe to presume that hideous, aquatic monstrosities live just under the water’s surface, waiting until nightfall to come ashore and feast on human flesh.) I was unclear on the details of the area’s decline and found this article which gives an in depth look.

In particular, I stopped off in Bombay Beach which is a collection of track homes and campers that appears to almost be a ghost town. (I did see a few people.) The article encapsulates the town’s decline:

.. Even in Bombay Beach, a hard-luck development on the east shore, hope stirs among the few hundred residents. Rising lake levels in the 1970s turned their lakefront into a flooded junkyard, with salt-encrusted trailers and cars slowly dissolving into the ooze. But in the cold dark recesses of the Ski Inn bar, retiree Barbara La Clair sees a silver lining.

“You’re out of the smog, out of the city,” she says. “It’s a nice place for retired people. It just grows on you.” La Clair started coming in the early 1960s, camping and fishing with her husband and four daughters, and retired here in 1990. In the ’60s, she recalls, Bombay Beach had five bars and five restaurants. Campers jammed the nearby state beach four rows deep, and you had to make reservations at the boat ramp.

 “Does anyone swim in it anymore?”

“Yuck,” says Paulette, the bartender.

I also stopped off at Salvation Mountain, a hill painted with religious scripture and platitudes. It’s perhaps most famous as being a part of the movie “Into the Wild” directed by Sean Penn.

Pictures of my adventures are viewable here.