My first close encounter with the Salton Sea was from the cockpit of a single-engine airplane during what the Federal Aviation Authority termed a ‘solo cross-country’, which required me as a student pilot to fly alone for a minimum of 150 nautical miles, with landings at three airports. This leg of the journey was about 60 miles south of Palm Springs, California, and I was traveling over what appeared to be a beautiful blue desert ocean. Trembling slightly, I took one hand off the controls and steadied the camera for a wide-angled selfie photo high above hundreds of beach cottages clustered along the north-western shore in between a labyrinth of narrow roads, but with no cars. What I learned later was that those homes had been abandoned long ago. Seventeen miles of beachfront was bordered by what I assumed to be white sand but was actually the sun-bleached skeletons of fish and birds. In the distance, I could see two yacht clubs — one on the eastern perimeter of the Sea and the other on the northwestern side. Curiously, the marinas and boat slips were empty.
When I landed thirty miles west at the Borrego Springs Airport, I secured a rental car and drove back to the north shore and the main town known as Salton City which led me to a street glamorously named “Yacht Club Drive”. Tumbleweeds defined a road which led to an area of flat broken concrete surrounded by dead palm trees. I could hear the heavy beat of salt water splashing against the tide. Otherwise, the overall stillness of the place gave me chills. From the sky looking down, the green-blue Sea appeared to be an ocean of life in the desert. Standing there at ground level, it felt like the end of the world. During the mid-twentieth century, this place had been a famous vacation destination known as ‘the Salton Riviera’ attracting a million visitors annually. But the push to develop short-term solutions for water, housing, and food had been wrought with unintended consequences.
I walked along a winding footpath above the water’s edge, careful to avoid areas of unstable erosion and sinkholes. The buoyant sea breeze was moist and salty. In the distance, faint trails of wispy white lines rose like thunderheads above the far horizon. Further along, I heard voices and turned to see two women standing next to a parked red Jeep talking about the Salton Sea. I said hello and asked about the white plumes rising from the south. It turned out that what I thought looked like vertical cloud formations was actually steam coming from a number of geothermal plants pumping high-pressure hot water from wells drilled a mile or more beneath the muddy shore. These pumping operations have been blamed for hundreds of small earthquakes in the area, they told me. They murmured darkly about a loss of biodiversity, and algae blooms that sucked the oxygen from the water and the millions of dead and dying fish. Pointing seaward, one of them said a local Indian reservation lay buried underwater. She spoke sadly about high poverty rates among the Indians and, more recently, how inflowing tributaries had been diverted to the metropolitan areas and that as the shoreline retreats, agricultural pesticides imbedded in the drying playa turn into toxic dust that blows freely in the desert winds. With that, I said thanks, feeling grateful for the calm, mild weather.
As I headed back towards the rental car, the weight of all that I had seen and heard made my knees buckle. I knew I needed to learn more about what had gone so wrong here. It was then that I realized how very few people even knew about the eco-genocide at a California waterway so massive they called it the Salton Sea. And I recognized that I wanted to write about it, and tell everyone what was going on, and to see if something could be done before it was too late.
The present-day Sea overlays the San Andreas Fault within the Salton Trough, which includes an ancient and mostly dry channel, most of which is below sea level, with interconnected faults extending south to the Gulf of California. I began to wonder what life would be like if the hundred-mile basin in which the Salton Sea resides were to be reunited with the Gulf.
The three-hundred square-mile lake is commonly referred to as accidental, the result of a levee breach due to an engineering mishap in 1905. I learned later that this was a false and harmful narrative which needed to be corrected. New evidence has been corroborated to dispute this notion. The Sea is in fact, the most recent example of a natural cycle of large waterways that have filled this part of the desert over thousands of years. Because of its ‘mythical’ origin as a mistake, the prevailing opinion is that the Salton Sea should be allowed simply to dry up and revert to its presumed and dehydrated natural beginnings. And, the true cause of ecological damage has been widely propagandized to excuse and occlude the destruction of what should be viewed as a valuable, irreplaceable natural resource. This is not unique to the Southern California desert region. Today, many of the worlds’ largest inland lakes are drying up due to the diversion of water for agricultural use, pollution and human-induced climate change. We live in a new geological epoch, defined by the substantial impact that human progress continues to have on our planet.
The characters in Salton Sea Tales are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons either dead or alive is purely coincidental. Almost everything else including the history and settings are real. To my surprise as the plot unfolded, I began to realize the theoretical plausibility of several future events. The novel you are about to read, and hopefully enjoy, falls within the genre of speculative fiction, or more generally, a potentially true story based upon what we now know.
G.W. 2025