The Salton Sea is proof than man<nature. It's the story of an irrigation canal from the Colorado river overflowing and filling the old sea bed which is now mid-California desert. The new formed sea proved to be a fantastic place for water-skiing, sport fishing and developers started buying up land and building streets, hotels etc. Bombay Beach is one of those vacation towns and now it's a ghost-town. Why you ask? Well a few years back the Salton Sea started getting more saline and fish started dying off. The salty runoff from the agriculture fields continued filling the basin and water continues evaporating but the sea just sits there and gets more potent. So potent that when you first step out of the car all you smell is rotting fish in the blazing heat. The way to the fish-lined beach is rows of trailers and small run-down houses, some lived in, some not. A lot of the people who live here bought land when it had value and now it's virtually worthless so they can't afford to move anywhere else, or they don't want to move, after all, this is their home. I didn't take photos of the community but on the way to the beach there were some skeletons of old homes sunk halfway into the sand due to flooding. It's a very strange place. I suggest you look into it yourself. There's even a documentary on it.
Travel
Los Angeles
A continuation of our blogging from our West Coast of America road trip. Next up was our stay in in the L.A. area featuring the oh-so-talented photographer and our gracious host, Logan. It was actually so great because we had an "in" in the city, where we got to try some gourmet hotdogs, fantastic coffee and some extra help in navigating the LA streets.
Big Sur
From Yosemite we took off down the coast towards LA. Because Yosemite is a couple hours from the coast we ended up driving most of HWY 1 at night. We got to make a few stops before clouds blew over and darkness set in. Bixby Bridge is a pretty iconic place so we stopped and snapped a few photos and looked around. We took off from there not without incident. The Caravan hatch flew open as we drove off and a camera bag and quadcopter hit the pavement behind us (aside from a few scratches and dents everything was OK). We stopped for about an hour at Pfeiffer Beach as we made our way down the coast. There were lots of nice rock formations and passages in the rocks where waves would crash through.