The hook
California's largest lake was an accident, a river breach that flooded the desert in 1905, and its dead resort towns are now the eeriest landscape in the state.
01Why it's worth it
In 1905 the Colorado River broke through an irrigation canal and poured into a below-sea-level basin for a year and a half before anyone could stop it, filling the Salton Sink with what became California's largest lake. For a while it was a miracle. Stocked with fish and ringed with marinas and nightclubs, sold as the Salton Riviera, it pulled a million and a half visitors a year in its 1950s heyday, more than Yosemite. Then it turned. With no way out, the water only grew saltier, farm runoff fouled it, storms wrecked the resorts, and the fish began dying by the millions, so the vacationers left and the towns died where they stood. What's here now is one of the strangest places in the state: a shrinking, salt-crusted sea that smells of decay, beaches of pulverized fish bone, and half-abandoned settlements going back to dust. Bombay Beach, the lowest town in the country at 223 feet below sea level, has become the unlikely heart of it, an almost-ghost-town where artists have filled the ruins with installations and throw a Biennale in the wreckage. It is beautiful and grim at the same time, and it's a preview of what happens when the water runs out.
02How to experience it
The sea is south of the desert resort towns, about two and a half hours from Palm Springs or San Diego and a long haul from anywhere else. Start at Bombay Beach on the east shore for the art and the ruins; Salvation Mountain and Slab City sit just to the south. It's punishing heat most of the year and the smell is real, so go in winter, and check dates for the Bombay Beach Biennale if you want the art scene at full tilt.