Salton City on the Salton Sea

Salton City

N 33 19.300  W 115 56.200

I’m standing on a small spit of land about 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles, 220 feet below sea level.  To the east is the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, 30 miles long and 15 miles wide.  To the west is a small marina with Salton City beyond.  If all had gone to plan, I’d be standing in the center of a posh, desert resort.  Across the busy marina would be the Salton City Yacht Club.  Beyond the marina would be 54,000 homes making up a city that, in 1966, the LA Times predicted would be one of the most important cities in Southern California by the year 2000.  The lake would be humming with fishing boats, ski boats, and jet skis.  Children would be laughing and playing on the beach.  But all did not go to plan.  The desert air is silent.  There doesn’t appear to be a single boat on the 376 square mile lake.  The marina is empty; the remains of the yacht club among dead palm trees.    The air is fetid and rank.  Dead fish float in the algae-green water at my feet.  While there are miles and miles of streets in Salton City with names like Acapulco and Riviera, there are only a few hundred houses in the center of town and almost none farther out.  What happened?  This disaster is not the result of one, but two massive mistakes.

The first occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century.  At that time, there was no Salton Sea, just the Salton Sink, a dry lake bed 300 feet below sea level bisected by the San Andreas Fault.  The sink was cut off from the Gulf of California by the delta of the Colorado River.  A group of entrepreneurs wanted to develop the Salton Sink into an agricultural paradise they called the Imperial Valley.  The Colorado River could provide all the water they needed – and it was higher than the land they intended to irrigate.  Engineers decided to use the Alamo River, a dry overflow channel, for most of the distance from the Colorado down into the Imperial Valley.   The headwaters of the Alamo were only 4000 feet from the Colorado but they were in Mexico and the land was sandy and unstable.  They built a canal head gate four miles north in California at Pilot Knob between two mounds of bedrock and ran a canal parallel to the Colorado south to the Alamo drybed.  On May 14^th, 1901, water flowed from the Pilot Knob head gate, through the little canal, down the Alamo, and into the Imperial Valley.  Lured by cheap land and water, settlers poured into the region, swelling the population from 2000 in 1902 to 10,000 in 1904. 

Unfortunately, it was difficult to keep the life-giving water flowing because silt built up in the canal south of Pilot Knob.  Therefore, in the summer of 1904, engineers made a cut between the Colorado and the Alamo, four miles south of Pilot Knob bypassing the pesky canal.  This cut was 50 feet wide, 6 feet deep, and 3300 feet long through the soft alluvial sand.  The developers applied to the government of Mexico for permission to build a head gate over the cut but this permission would not be granted until a year later.  In the meantime, a series of torrential rainstorms turned the Colorado River into a raging monster.  The cut eroded to 160 wide and the entire river changed course, down the Alamo and New Rivers into the Salton Sink, leaving the riverbed below the cut completely dry.  The water cut enormous trenches through the desert as it raced down the valley. At the bottom, the water level slowly rose and the Salton Sea was born.

Over the next two years, many attempts were made to plug the breach but most of what was dumped into the gap just washed away.  When his Southern Pacific railroad line was threatened by the rising waters of the lake, railroad mogul E.H. Harriman asked President Teddy Roosevelt for help from the U.S. government.  Railroad cars dumped 2,057 carloads of rock, 221 carloads of gravel, and 203 carloads of clay into the break in 15 days.  Finally, on January 27, 1907, the breach was closed.  The Salton Sea stopped rising at 195 feet below sea level, 76 feet above the pre-flood sink surface.  Scientists predicted that the new Salton Sea would slowly evaporate.  However, runoff from the fields of the Imperial Valley stabilized the sea’s level at around 250 feet below by 1925.

The second massive mistake occurred in the 1950’s when land developer M. Penn Phillips decided to build Salton City on the west banks of the Salton Sea.  California’s real estate market was booming as WWII’s GI’s moved to California to start their families in the suburbs of Los Angeles.  Phillips had successfully developing several communities in the desert outside L.A. including Hesperia, Victorville, and near Edwards AFB.  Salton City seemed like a no-brainer given the spectacular growth of Palms Springs just sixty miles to the north.  The air was clear, the water warm, and the sea was stocked with fish.  Phillips bought 19,600 acres of desert for $2.4 million divided it into 54,000 parcels.  Streets were laid out, utilities were installed, and schools and other public services were built.  Gas stations, restaurants, motels, and other stores soon appeared.  The Yacht Club, an air strip, and a championship golf course added to the allure.  Prospective buyers, brought in by bus and plane, snapped up the lots for $2000 to $4000 each.  In 1961, California Department of Fish and Game predicted that the Salton Sea would be dead by the 1980’s.  M. Penn Phillips sold his interests in Salton City and moved on.  By the mid-60’s, Salton City was a popular getaway.  The weekend activity really did look like the promotional films that were shown to the dwindling crowds at the welcome center.  But few homes were ever built.

The federal government designated the Salton Sea as a dump for the alkaline, polluted runoff from the Imperial and Coachella Valleys which was increasing annually. The rising salinity of the lake worried environmentalists, residents and investors alike.  Then in 1976, hurricanes dumped an unusual amount of rain on the desert and the water levels rose, flooding the low-lying buildings including the Yacht Club.    The developers left, the stores and restaurants closed, and Salton City was soon forgotten.  Only a few eccentrics still called it home.  Beginning in the 90’s, algae blooms periodically rob the lake of oxygen, killing off fish by the millions.  Rotting fish line the shore, giving the city its distinctive smell.  Regular efforts to save the lake usually end in disappointment.  In 1999, San Diego made a deal with Imperial County whereby Imperial County farmers would be paid to conserve water thus reducing the runoff into the Salton Sea.  The sea level has begun to drop while the salinity continues to climb.    Undaunted, locals still wait for the day when Salton City’s promise will be fulfilled.  “Could be any time now,” says one old codger in the 2004 documentary Plagues and Pleasure on the Salton Sea.  Standing on this little spit of land, I doubt it.

Question of the Day:  After Salton City, M. Penn Williams went to Oregon and started another development that was destined to fail.  Where was it?

Real Estate: The Desert Song.  Time Magazine, Mar. 2, 1959.

Laflin, P., The Salton Sea: California’s overlooked treasure. The Periscope, Coachella Valley Historical Society, Indio, California. 1995. 

Kennan, G., The Salton Sea : an account of Harriman's fight with the Colorado River.  New York: Macmillan, 1917.