I’ve been wanting to visit The Salton Sea for quite a while, just because it’s history is so cool. About 10,000 years ago a huge sea covered most of southern California. Eventually it dried up leaving a salty basin. In more recent times Lake Cahuilla has formed and dried up and formed again from run-off from the Colorado river. The most recent drying-up of the lake was about 300 years ago and it covered an area much larger than the current Salton Sea.

So that brings us up to about 1901 when engineers build an canal to irrigate the farm lands of the Imperial Valley with water from the Colorado. It worked great. Except that silt eventually blocked up the canal, and in 1905 when they redirected the Colorado to avoid this blockage floodwaters broke through and filled part of the basin from Lake Cahuilla.

And thus the Salton Sea was born. Today it’s slowly drying up from evaporation, (there’s no outlet for the water so it just keeps getting saltier and saltier), but it’s a fun place to visit. For a short time anyway. I stayed along the south and east coasts, so I missed the “highly” populated areas, but still I was surprised with how little development was there. It reminded me of the midwest, except hotter, with more signs in Spanish, and less people. I spent the day walking around at the Sonny Bono Wildlife Refuge. The beaches along the sea are all made up of the shells of dead coral as you can see in the close-up picture. Also, lots of dead fish.

Of course, I took a lot of sunrise pictures. These are the views of the lake from the campground I stayed at.

The white birds are giant swans. If I remember right they are only around the Salton Sea during the winter, but other birds show up throughout the rest of the year.

I got a campground partly because I wanted a shower after the couple days of 90 degree weather, but mostly because I wanted to slow down and take a break from the traveling. At this point it still hadn’t sunk in yet that I have all this time. Also because of the heat I’d spent less time in Anza-Borrego and at the Salton Sea and felt like I was moving pretty quickly down the road. So I sucked it up and spent the money, ($17, annoying when my daily goal is only $20), and rented myself a small plot of land for the night. I spent the time reading a book and settling into the idea of going slower on this trip.

Reading the book was a nice reminder that this is more than just a road trip, this is my life. A reminder to take advantage of this time to read books, do some writing and work on my own projects. Those things are actually as much of the reason for taking this time off as is seeing the country.

In the week after that I started becoming more and more comfortable with just stopping random places and reading. Read three books that first week, so I think I’m starting to get the hang of the whole slowing down thing.

Categories: Locations, Pictures
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I’m sitting here in Flagstaff with my brother, his roommates and friends. Been an excellent couple days here taking a break from the traveling. It’s sort of nice not to have to decide where I’m going and what I’m doing for the day. I just ask Elliot what he’s doing. He says, “Um… laundry,” and I say “Ok! Let’s go!”

Today he spent the day with two of his friends messing around on their guitars and I spent the day recording them. Then we proceeded to have vast amounts of fun with playing it backwards and changing the pitch to chipmunk style. Extremely amusing and we weren’t even high. An excellent Saturday afternoon. Tonight we play ma jiang.

But I digress. I wanted to update you all on the first part of my trip now that I’ve had a chance to go through all my pictures. We start with Anza-Borrego State Park in California.

The pictures above and to the right are from Borrego Springs, the town surrounded by Anza-Borrego State Park. The park is the largest state park in CA and I believe it’s the largest state park in the lower 48 states

I had a good chance to spend some time photographing these statues while walking my bike back to my car at the Visitor’s Center after getting a flat. Not quite my idea when I headed out. I’ll just have to go back and do the bike trip around later. I did drive part of the route later and it does look like a nice two hour or so bike ride. Perhaps when I come back it won’t be 95 degrees in the (very little) shade. (In NOVEMBER!)

On a ranger’s suggestion I drove out to Font’s Point. This involved about 4 miles each way of an unpaved, sandy road that had me a bit worried about getting stuck for the night. Then I realized it wouldn’t have mattered. I needed to find a camping spot for the night anyay and if I got stuck I had nowhere to be all of the next day to deal with it. But I made it just fine and was rewarded with an awesome view of the badlands at sunset.

I highly recommend a drive out to Font’s Point if you visit Anza-Borrego.

I also had fun playing with my camera. I think I took about 40 pictures of this Ocotillo plant near Font’s Point. But lucky for you I’ve only posted the best.

One of the nice things about Anza-Borrego is that it’s pretty much open camping. There are a few proper campgrounds, (but at $20 bucks a night I wasn’t going to them), a few primitive campgrounds with just toilets, ($7, more reasonable), and then acres and acres of free boondocking.

This, of course, was my choice for both the nights I was there. Here’s the view at sunrise from the place I stayed the second night:

Driving to this spot in the dark I had unfortunately overshot the place I’d wanted to stay at near some hiking suggested by the ranger. Considering the 90+ degrees of the day before and feeling like I wanted to be on the road again I decided to continue out of the park towards the Salton Sea with plans to come back later.

Tomorrow, I’ll take you out to my visit to the Salton Sea. But now, it’s time to learn how to play ma jiang.

Categories: Locations, Pictures
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