Why is it that here of all places, in the middle of the southern California desert, one would find this huge lake called the Salton Sea? As improbable as this desert lake seems, for most of history a lake has existed here all along.
The area here is a vast depression, or sink, formed as the Pacific plate slid along the San Andreas Fault. On the west side of the fault, the Laguna, Vallecito, and Santa Rosa Mountains were uplifted; while on the east side a vast depression formed. In ancient times, the Gulf of California reached much farther north than it does today and the Colorado River delta, after building up to a certain size, cut off the top section of the gulf, creating a huge inland saltwater sea.
This first sea eventually dried up and the whole area, hundreds of feet below sea level, remained dry until thousands of years ago when the Colorado River, after changing its course at some point, filled up the basin and created a new freshwater lake. This lake, named Lake Cahuilla after the native Indians, probably existed for centuries.
But this freshwater lake dried up also, however, as the Colorado changed its course once more. The whole process, with the lake filling and then drying up, as the river periodically changed its course, probably repeated itself every four or five hundred years. So the fact of having a huge inland lake sitting in one of the most barren areas on Earth was a natural occurrence, really.
But before 1905, for hundreds of years the Salton Sink, as it is known, had been dry—just a blistering hot, barren, salt-laden desert that early settlers moving west feared to cross. However, a mistake that year caused the Colorado River to spill once again into the ancient lakebed, creating the modern Salton Sea.
It started as a practical plan to irrigate what was being promoted as the Imperial Valley. The idea was to cut an irrigation canal branching off the Colorado River, starting at Yuma, and run it over to the valley. Bringing water to the immense desert basin opened up the possibility of creating an agricultural goldmine.
Because of the massive sand dunes between the river and the Salton Sink, however, the canal had to cut south into Mexico and then angle back northwest. It was a good plan in theory, and since the whole basin area was several hundred feet lower than the river the water would flow by gravity. Once the canal brought in the water the whole area could be farmed, and with the year-round sunshine the harvesting would be immense.
The engineers began work on the project just as the twentieth century turned over. The problem, however, was in trying to control the massive flow of the Colorado. Unlike today, before all the dams were built, the Colorado river of the early 1900s was a raging torrent that drained the snowmelt from over 260,000 square miles, from Montana on down. It could carry then, at peak flood, up to 360 million cubic feet of water each hour. It’s hard to visualize the numbers, but put it this way: at that rate, the Colorado could fill over 60 Olympic-sized swimming pools in less than a minute. But the kicker is that the Colorado is extremely silty—depositing over a million tons daily, enough silt to fill the Panama Canal in one year—and so like liquid sandpaper the Colorado scours and grinds away anything in its path.
The levees and locks the engineers built to divert and control the river to the canal were eventually breached, and in 1905 the river poured unchecked into the Salton Sink. The basin began to fill, and the floodwaters ravaged the small towns of Calexico and Mexicali near the Mexican border. The Liverpool Salt Works, which since 1885 had been profitably mining salt in the area—remember, the whole area had once been sea bottom— suddenly found itself under 30 feet of water. To this day, the Liverpool Salt Works buildings still remain under water and divers sometimes explore the ruins—one of the strangest ghost towns in the West.
To add to the problem, the river flooding that year was the worst recorded. No one had any good ideas how to stop the river, and it poured into the valley for almost two years. The whole area was filling up with water and things were getting a bit desperate.
Eventually, in 1907, the Southern Pacific Railroad, watching with dismay as the waters kept rising and their tracks began to wash away, put a plan into effect. The plan was to build a railroad trestle across the largest break, and then pull flatcars loaded with boulders along the trestle as men dumped the boulders over the side into the raging waters. Enough flatcars, enough boulders, and the river could be contained. Or so that was the plan.
They began by driving wooden piles nearly ninety feet down into the sand all along the levee break. Three times the piles were washed out by the water’s torrents. That alone should give anyone an idea of what they had to contend with, but finally, on January 27, 1907, the piles were all in and the trestle bridge was built.
The Southern Pacific began rounding up every flatcar they could find, piling them up with boulders and sending them along to the trestle bridge. As the flatcars arrived they were positioned on the trestle bridge and men frantically hand-pushed the boulders off. If the boulder was too big to push off by hand, the men attached small charges of dynamite and cracked it right on the flatcar and let the pieces disappear over the side.
It is easy to imagine the men being a bit nervous about the whole thing, knowing the river might wash away the piles for a fourth time any moment, and they must have known anyone falling off a flatcar into the raging river faced certain death, but they did the work all the same. It took over three thousand flatcars of boulders to stem the breach—over a period of 15 days, averaging 8 flatcars per hour—but the river was forced back into its original course.
What remained, now sitting placidly under the bright desert sun, was a new lake some 50 miles long and 15 miles wide, and averaging about 70 feet in depth. It was suddenly California’s largest lake, by far, and actually still is. The problem was what to do with it, but it wasn’t long before opportunists saw the chance to begin selling waterfront lots to gullible out-of-towners, who snapped them up so fast that new communities sprang up practically overnight.
For a while, the new Salton Sea was a hit and drew people from all around the world, and provided boating, fishing, and other recreation. The original plan to irrigate the area was put into action, and today, as mentioned before, the Imperial Valley is a powerhouse of agriculture.
Had the engineers showed some bit of forethought, and worked on a plan to give the lake a regular, replenishing source of water from the Colorado, the lake might have stayed healthy. But the engineering issues were probably too great, and, who knows, maybe the townspeople in Calexico and Mexicali, never mind the owners of the Liverpool Salt Works, rode all the engineers out of town on rails, tarred and feathered. But the problem was that with no inlet and no outlet, the sea just sat there over the years becoming increasingly salty.
The entire sea is 228 feet below sea level. In fact, the bed of the Salton Sea is only about 5 feet higher than the lowest point in Death Valley, which is of course the lowest point in all of North America. For a while fish thrived in the sea, including croaker, corvina, sargo, mullet, striped bass, and tilapia.
But the sea has naturally picked up all the salt from the old sea bottom, plus it began to receive the agricultural run-off over the years from all the farmland that sprung up around it. The water sits there and bakes in the sun, evaporating, and becomes saltier with time. Now the current salt level is greater than that of the Pacific Ocean. If it gets much higher scientists expect all the fish will die, except perhaps the tilapia, which seems to be very salt-tolerant.
As it stands now, the fish periodically die off anyway in strange instances of oxygen-robbing algae bloom. When this happens, thousands of suffocated dead fish float to the surface in a rancid, stinking mess. The carcass line the shore for miles, and puts a damper, we might guess, on the recreation. In the summer heat the smell can make you sick. It can be smelled for miles away.
Birds have been dying by the thousands also. In 1996 a mysterious illness, probably contracted from dying and unhealthy fish, killed ducks, grebes, pelicans, and other birds at the rate of 640 each day.
The sea continues to evaporate and shrink, thickening with the run-off of every type of agricultural fertilizer and pesticide in use. It is becoming a biologically foul soup steaming in the desert heat.
Many of the buildings built during the boom times have become derelicts. Old marinas decay in the sun, and once popular resort motels sit cracking and weathering. Periodically, political campaigns emerge to “Save the Salton Sea.” It seems that eventually, however, the Salton Sea is going to become the American version of the Dead Sea.
