Plagues & Pleasures On the Salton Sea

Let me tell you about a place

far beyond the sprawl of suburban America,

where success and failure collide,

and where utopia and the apocalypse

meet to dance a dirty tango.

It's a special place,

a bit closer than you might think,

that draws a unique group of outsiders,

looking for an awfully beautiful life,

on the edge of a beautifully awful paradise.

Uh, you know what,

there's very few people that know about the Salton sea...

Very few.

If they don't know where it's at,

you tell 'em 50 miles south of Palm Springs...

Which I use as a reference point.

California's version of the French riviera,

with beautiful weather,

water available for boating,

and as a place for recreation and fishing and so on.

The fishing in the summer is great... Great!

The hotter the water, the better the fishing.

That's not edible fish.

If they are eating those fish, and they eat very much of 'em,

they'll get botulism poisoning.

That sea is filthy.

Dead fish, dead birds, dead everything over there.

We have the odor problem,

we have the insect problem...

Namely the common housefly.

It gets hot here in the summer.

It's 120 degrees here,

100 degrees at midnight; You know, it's warm.

But that's what we got air conditioning for.

We do even go swimming in the water.

It's more saltier than the ocean.

And it heals your skin.

If you have a skin problem, it heals your skin.

Why clean up a most useful sewer?

It's the greatest sewer the world has ever seen.

Leave it that way.

It's perfect for that purpose.

If it had been handled correctly,

it would have been another palm Springs right now.

The smell.

It's the smell... a lot.

And then the fact that we don't have anything here.

It is rather bleak.

Bleak is the word.

The most beautiful body of water in California.

You can go boating, you can go fishing,

you can go jet skiing.

You have beautiful rock formations.

You have the mountains,

where you can see, in the summertime,

you can see snow caps on the mountains.

You have everything.

You have everything that you can find nowhere else.

There's no fast foods here.

There's no recreation

for youngsters, kids or anything.

I mean there ain't nothing here.

You can't get nothing... The stores close at 6:00!

So you can't buy booze after 6:00.

I like it here.

I'll die here.

I mean, come on,

we ain't even got a mall or nothin' out here.

We're away from everything!

But it is just a super, super, wonderful place!

Lying well below sea level,

in one of the hottest and driest valleys on earth,

sits the wonderfully bizarre Salton sea.

It was once hailed as the fishing capital of the world

and even rivaled the nearby resort town of Palm Springs

in popularity.

But now after a string of catastrophes,

it sits virtually abandoned and forgotten.

Only a handful of eccentrics remain,

carving out their own slice of paradise,

on the shores of this so-called "ecological disaster."

But disaster is well known to the people of imperial valley.

In fact, the Salton sea itself is just one big mistake.

In 1901,

developers with a dream to transform the desert,

diverted water from the Colorado river

to a dried lake bed named the Salton sink.

As an ancient overflow for the Colorado river,

the soil was nutrient-rich

and the warm climate

made it possible to grow crops year-round.

Renamed the imperial valley, land was sold,

and farming flourished in the desert.

However, silt eventually blocked

the entrance to the canal,

and water delivery was all but cut off to the farmers.

Under pressure from desperate investors,

engineers made several unprotected cuts

into the river.

Then in 1905, amidst heavy spring rains,

the erratic Colorado broke free, changed course,

and headed straight for the imperial valley.

The river that had once brought prosperity

now began to destroy everything in its path

as it began to collect in the lowest point:

the Salton sink.

In order to protect a vital shipping route,

Southern pacific railroad tycoon, Edward Harriman,

intervened with the support of president Theodore Roosevelt

to do battle with the river.

With thousands of men

and countless tons of rock and sand,

the railroad and the United States government

attempted several times to plug the breach.

After tremendous effort and 16 months of flooding,

they finally managed to turn back the river.

The desert heat should have quickly evaporated

this man-made mistake.

However, salty irrigation runoff

from farmers in the imperial valley

sustained the newly-formed sea,

and increased its salinity to near ocean levels.

An engineering screw-up had given birth to a sea

35 miles long and 15 miles wide

in the middle of the desert.

And they thought

that the Salton sea would be good for fish,

if they could get the right kind of fish to grow in there.

So they went down to San Felipe and seen

Fish out of the surf there.

But they tried to keep all of the sharks out of there.

They didn't want to put any sharks in here.

And they brought the fish up...

I meet them at Salt Creek up here...

And they put the fish in right there at Salt Creek.

That was 1951, in June.

Finally in 1957, we started catching a few corvina

at Salt Creek.

We caught the first two limits of fish

that were ever caught in the Salton sea.

We caught 12 fish there,

averaged between 8 and 10 pounds.

And that started the fishing down here.

By 1960 there were eight boat landings around the sea,

launching 50 to 100 boats a day.

They were here by the hundreds, all up and down this highway,

and we fed 100 fisherman a day here

during the summertime, you know.

If you like to fish,

there are plenty in the Salton sea.

So far they've been caught up to 33 pounds.

There are corvina, tortuava and mullet in abundance.

It's not anything like it used to be,

it used to be beautiful!

There used to be just trailers and motor homes

and skiers and boaters and swimmers... Everywhere!

In the '60s, particularly,

it was really a vibrant sea.

You not only had skiing, swimming and such,

you had the rich folks coming down from L.A.

With the sport fishing boats,

putting in, I guess, probably in north shore,

and doing the sport fishing on the weekends.

All kinds of nice little, you know, secluded places

for those who wanted to get away from the crowd.

Swimming and drinking beer.

Drinking beer and throwing... skimming rocks.

The water was brackish then, it isn't like today.

It was less salty than the ocean at that time.

We used to have fish fries.

So anybody that caught any brought 'em up

and the corvina... and, oh god, they were so good!

They cooked 'em in a beer batter.

Fun! Fun! Fun!

Water means fun,

and Salton sea water is ideal for the amateur skier,

superb for the skillful.

The reason?

The low altitude and the accompanying density

makes Salton sea one of the fastest bodies of water

on earth.

In the '50s and '60s,

the sea took in more...

Had more tourists than Yosemite park.

Down here we had boat races.

We had everything.

We had all kinds of celebrities at the Salton sea

and big events.

We had Sonny Bono.

We had the Marx brothers,

and the beach boys used to come out here.

The yacht clubs on all sides were developing and booming

and boats were in and out of the water.

Eventually this area

was laid out as a retirement community.

They basically laid this out, put in the infrastructure,

and then started selling it.

Out of the labor and mind of man,

out of the barren desert,

out of the many months of endeavor