The Salton Sea

            “Well, that’s jes a fine ‘how-do-ya-do’ Albie! Wait ‘til the boss finds ‘bout this! Yore shur gonna git a good kickin’!”

            “Jeez Frankie! I’ze didn’t do nuttin’! I was jes lookin’ over thar when I guess I shoulda bin lookin’ right heah. But I swears….. I didn’t do a dern thang!

                        That was the start of a long ‘conversation’ back in 1905 when the mighty Colorado River pushed its way past a head gate in the new aqueduct that was being constructed to enable water to flow from the All-American Canal over to the Imperial Valley. The Imperial Valley is one of California’s largest and most prolific growing areas. But it sits smack-dab in the Sonoran Desert which means by definition….. it hardly rains there at all. What great place to put a growing area!

                        Little did Frankie and Albie know that at the time, this calamity would create one of the largest lakes in the country.

                        Oops! The ‘mishap’ took more than two years to fix and when it was all said and done, a very large lake emerged from a depression in the Southern California desert.

                        There was already a low spot there which had been filled, drained, and refilled over the millennia but these projects were overseen by the Big Boss, Mother Nature herself! Not humans and their quirky ways of doing things! Now there was a lake where a large salt deposit once sat and it measured 15 miles across, 35 miles long, and about 80 feet deep! This is large enough to qualify for the #19 spot on the Top Hot100 Hits of Lakes in America, coming in at a groovy 347 square miles!

                        Believe it or not, the lake stayed fairly constant for about sixty or seventy years because the farmers in the area took more water from the Colorado than they used and let the rest just flow down into the Salton Sea. But…. sooner or later, someone got a bit smarter and realized that less water would be needed if new watering methods that conserved water were being used. That’s all well and good unless that realization comes with unwanted/unrealized (?) consequences with somewhat dire results. As the water level of the ‘lake’ started to recede, those old salt flats now also containing the residue of a mixture of pesticides and fertilizers that had run off with all of that ‘extra’ water, dried up and became toxic clouds of dust whipped up by the winds that howl through there on a regular basis. Ouch! Plus, the salinity level increased as the water level dropped making it toxic to most of the fishes in there and confounding the birds that now used this area a stopover in the Pacific Flyway.

                        Couple that with the rest of the story.

                        In the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s someone realized that there was a big body of inland water in close proximity to major Southern California population centers. Little towns sprang up where once there were just cacti and rattlesnakes. Places like Salton City, Desert Shores, Salton Sea Beach, and Bombay Beach. These places were mostly unincorporated sections of land that some developers bought and gridded over with nautical sounding streets (mostly on paper) just waiting for the boom/boon to come.

                        Well, it did come, to some extent, and it lasted long enough to whet some real estate appetites. Folks did come there; resorts were constructed, and even Frank Sinatra once performed in Bombay Beach! Yup, ole Blue Eyes made the 45-minute trip down from his pad in Palm Springs and gave a memorable performance. You can also add in the Beach Boys and Bing Crosby, both were known to frequent the area, if only to have some fun.

                        Then that eventual lowering of the water level and some ugly fish die-offs signaled the end of the short-lived era that was once a glorious time.

                        Let’s fast-forward to today and get to where this is all going.

                        No one really knows!

                        The land in, under, and around the lake is owned in major parts by the Feds, the State, the local Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian Tribe, and the Imperial Irrigation District. As you can imagine there are lots of reasons why a consensus can be difficult to reach. Now we’re going to throw the Big-Ticket Item into the mix…. there is about $450,000,000,000 (that’s BILLION if you’re counting zeros!) of lithium under all of this, especially the lake.

                                    This alone could make California’s Gold Rush of 1849 seem like Amateur Hour. It is obvious that there is much more to come, and I’d usually end with something like “Film at Eleven” but I’m not sure that there will be more information by then, so we’ll just say,

“Stay tuned for further developments that may develop in this developing story.”

                        Amen.