Salton Sea

Kaz wrote:
Reading this thread is so sad. When I was a kid (early-60's), my Dad and I would go fishing at Salton Sea. We'd fish for something called "Corvina" (I think). We'd take a boat out to a barge that had drinks and a snack bar, and we'd fish all day. What great times.

But now, my Dad is gone and it sounds like Salton Sea (at least as a destination spot) is essentially gone as well.

Skip

yep, corvina. member of the sea bass family, and REAL good eatin'. I seem to remember a barge down in the south end, by Red Hill marina.

I was at Slab City in February. Salvation Mountain has volunteer care takers and is well taken care of.

There is an effort to clean up Slab City and there are some really nice sections. They have a memorial dumpster, but have trouble getting funding for it. Water is available from the Internet Cafe.

Did it once and yep, no need to return. I found it to be a very depressing area with all the empty buildings and then there was the smell when you get close to the shore, along with lots of dead fish along the shore when we were there. I could see what the area used to be and found it to be a sad shadow of what it must have been like. Some folks still seem to like it...............

Well, I went. It was surprisingly uneventful. From the road, it looks beautiful. The state park looks clean and there was no smell around it at the time. As I went further I did finally get the smell. Anyways, glad I went and checked it out. No need to go back, however. A pic to prove I was there :-)

Reading this thread is so sad. When I was a kid (early-60's), my Dad and I would go fishing at Salton Sea. We'd fish for something called "Corvina" (I think). We'd take a boat out to a barge that had drinks and a snack bar, and we'd fish all day. What great times.

But now, my Dad is gone and it sounds like Salton Sea (at least as a destination spot) is essentially gone as well.

Skip

One thing everyone seems to miss in the southern area is the Mud Pots just outside of Niland. It almost takes a GPS to find them, but they are a pretty rare find.

Visit the Salton Sea before it partially disappears. The lake is receding and the chances of fully rehabilitating the lake is practically nil.

Most of the runoff from farming no longer works its way into the lake since farmers in the area started selling much of their water to San Diego. We are in our fourth year of drought in CA and there is no available water that can be used for the lake. It is estimated that it will cost close to $9 billion dollars to clean up the toxic stew that will become exposed as the lake dries up.

What we will probably end up with is a handful of smaller lakes or lagoons to accommodate the many migratory birds that visit Salton Sea every year.

Salton Sea was accidentally created when a canal broke and flooded the area with Colorado River water for two years over 100 years ago. That water would have eventually evaporated if it wasn't for Congress designating the lands within the Salton basin below -220 feet as storage for wastes and seepage water from irrigated lands in Imperial valley.

What we have now is basically a stinking open sewer.

At one time they say the Gulf of California extended all the way up to the area of Indio. And in more recent times that area down through there was actually a very large freshwater lake vastly bigger than the Salton Sea. If you know where to look on the hillsides you can still find ancient rock fish traps constructed by the Indians on old shorelines. In fact you can still identify terraces where the water cut into those hillsides.

If it were not for silt coming down with the Colorado River the Gulf would probably still range all the way up to Indio.

The Colorado River has pretty much filled in the northern portion of the Gulf of California (or Sea of Cortez which I think is a more romantic sounding name for it).

We would water ski at the Sea in the early 60s. My friend told me a story about his great-grandfather and another guy that wanted too irrigate their farmland. They cut a little trench into the bank of the Colorado River. Well, things got out of control and the breach got bigger and bigger. This was the great flood. It took months to get it closed. The Salton Sea was a fresh water lake and over time with no new water coming in it got salty.

96Bounder30E wrote:
Visit Slab city while your there......just outside of Niland.....

Yes, very interesting, as well as Salvation Mountain. Haven't seen it since Lenard Knight passed away though.