You probably wouldn’t expect to find a 350 square-mile lake in the middle of California’s Sonoran Desert. 

Neither did I. When I visited Joshua Tree National Park, I anticipated lizards, cacti, and expanses of sand. But on our last day camping, after trekking up to Keyes point for a view of San Gorgonio Mountain and the San Andreas fault, something in the distance caught my eye. 

“Is that… water?” I asked my friend. 

We were confused. Might it be a mirage? Only after finding cell service again were we able to confirm our sighting: A lake exists in the middle of the desert.

The Salton Sea. We knew that we had to go. 

A quick detour south, we zipped down Route 86 passing through towns with cutesy names like “Desert Shores” and “Bombay Beach.” We expected to find an off-brand Palm Springs, or maybe an Indio with water. Up until this point, the desert towns of the Coachella and Imperial Valleys had impressed us with their charm. 

But a few miles in, we knew that something about the Salton Sea was off. The air was thick. The visibility was terrible. We had to turn our wipers on to brush off the dust caked onto our front windshield. We passed two other cars on the entire four-hour excursion. Then there was a smell unlike any I’ve ever smelled before — rotting fish with sharp notes of drain cleaner and old eggs. Yuck.

When we arrived, Bombay Beach turned out to be a 1960’s ghost town. Desert Shores wasn’t much different. The drive-in movie theater was packed with abandoned (now vintage) cars. Old diners and restaurants were reduced to ruins. The fancy Yacht Club lay crumbling under its own weight. A single flag, bleached white from 60 years of desert sun, blew gently in the wind, somehow still clinging to an upright flagpole. The flagpole, as the last remaining vertical structure in the town, seemed aware of its own irony.  “Looks like someone has surrendered,” we joked. 

If there’s one word that sums up the Salton Sea, it’s post-apocalyptic. The ritzy resort-town lifestyles of the Salton Sea’s past are long gone now, and what remains is a desolate shell of what once was. Why? 

It’s the same reason that my friend and I turned the car around and headed home sooner rather than later: We couldn’t stand the thick air, the mysterious dust, and that god-awful smell. Environmental degradation drove people away. 

To understand what happened, you need to know how it all began.  The Salton Sea never should have existed in the first place.

The story begins with the Salton Basin, which is the second-lowest point in North America. It sits 226 feet below sea level and it had been bone dry since around 1700. 

Then enterprising Americans started tinkering with the region’s water cycle. In 1900, the California Development Company diverted water from the Colorado River through a 60-mile canal to the Imperial Valley for farming operations. It was an audacious project. But it worked. The irrigation canal supplied water to the growing desert agriculture industry starting in 1900. Then, five short years later, the plan backfired. 

In 1905, it rained a lot in the southwest. The rain flooded the Colorado River, breaching the new irrigation canals, and flooding the Salton Basin. For two years much of the Colorado River flowed into the desert, not toward the ocean, and the Salton Sea was born. The engineers at the California Development company did not foresee how unpredictable weather events would lead to disaster. That led to one of the biggest engineering mistakes in American history. As a result, the largest lake in California is located in the driest region of the state.

Real estate investors saw this unique landscape as an opportunity– perhaps the Salton Sea could be the best of both (dry and wet) worlds. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, they developed the area into a prominent resort destination, hence the towns of Bombay Beach and Desert Shores. With the arrival of hotels, casinos, and upscale waterfront properties, Hollywood’s elite flocked to the area for the luxury desert-riviera experience. The Beach Boys docked their boats at the North Shore Yacht Club. Just down the street, Frank Sinatra and Sonny Bono partied amongst the desert palms. Look closely and you could spot President Dwight Eisenhower playing a round at the Salton City Golf Course. But the “miracle in the desert” was short-lived.

Ecology cut short the Salton Sea’s heyday.  With no natural outlets, what flowed into the lake stayed in the lake.  The slow trickle of runoff from Imperial Valley farms fortified the water with a polluted concoction of fertilizers, pesticides, and selenium, leading to toxic algal blooms. The lake is also becoming saltier as water evaporates in the dry heat. This was a death sentence for aquatic life. You can still smell the consequences from miles away. It’s no wonder that everyone packed up and left after 1970.

The obvious solution for fixing a lake that shouldn’t have been there in the first place is to let it disappear. It wouldn’t be hard — the lake should dry up in about 50 years if people let it be. But the haphazard actions of the agricultural industry complicate things. 

This complicating factor is dust. As the water in the Salton Sea evaporates, the lakebed underneath becomes exposed to air. A century of toxic sediments, accumulated from industrial and agricultural drainage, are suddenly one wind gust away from becoming airborne. The dust we encountered on our windshield makes sense now. 

The threat of toxic dust storms is a scary one. Once the dust is inhaled by humans, it can cause asthma, bronchitis, and other pulmonary diseases. It’s already affecting the vulnerable low-income communities of color at the northern and southern tips of the lake: residents of the Imperial Valley are three times as likely to have asthma as other Californians.  Even worse, experts say that toxic dust storms have the potential to intensify as the lake continues to dry, and could reach Los Angeles or Las Vegas. 

What is so complicated is that it is agricultural run-off that holds the dust at bay.  That makes agricultural runoff a can’t-live-with-it, can’t-live-without-it problem for the Salton Sea. On the one hand, it’s the only thing keeping the water levels high enough to prevent a major public health disaster. On the other hand, it’s polluting the water and turning the Salton Sea into a toxic lake. 

Various government agencies and non-governmental organizations have been trying to find a feasible solution for years. 

There was a glimmer of hope from 2003-2017 when the Imperial Irrigation Authority struck a deal with the San Diego County Water Authority. The agreement was that San Diego would help Imperial Valley farmers build up agricultural infrastructure to improve water efficiency,

lessening their demand for irrigation water. In turn, the Imperial Valley farmers allowed the water they saved to flow to San Diego as drinking water. With agriculture operating efficiently and San Diego getting the excess, there was less runoff flowing to the Salton Sea, threatening to lower the water level and expose the drying lakebed to the desert wind. This exposed sediment, accumulated with decades of toxins from agricultural runoff, could cause deadly toxic dust storms. To prevent an air quality disaster, the agreement required that for 15 years, the Imperial Valley allow some of its share of the Colorado River to flow into the Salton Sea. It was a win-win solution. The agreement wasn’t renewed after 2017 because the Imperial Valley didn’t want to bear the burden of keeping the Salton Sea under control– the local government doesn’t have enough money or resources to continue pouring their water into a body of water that generates no revenue. Now, the Imperial Irrigation Authority is looking to the California state government to take over mitigation efforts.

The situation is bleak at best. Water levels in the Salton Sea are dwindling, and freshwater is scarce for the majority of California. The state government is struggling to find a feasible solution. Some are beginning to say that it’s too late.

As we turned north and headed for home, my friend and I pondered our brief venture into the post-apocalyptic world of the Salton Sea. Utterly stunned, we couldn’t help but feel like stumbled on the skeleton hidden in California’s closet. 

What worries us most is that the Salton Sea may not be an artifact of the past, but a harbinger of the future. All over the state, people are growing crops in the desert, extracting and propelling water around California like it’s Gatorade at a football game, just like the irrigators did in 1900. Will these plots of irrigated dryland result in the accidental creation of a 6 million acre-foot lake and the looming threat of toxic dust storms 100 years into the future? Based on what we learned from the Salton Sea, perhaps. Will problems of some kind arise? Absolutely.