Salton Sea

Salton Sea Shore

Article and photography by Natasha Petrosova 


We were preparing for our trip to Salton Sea area.  Our final destination was Salvation Mountain and Slab City.  But abandoned cities by salton sea  and dead sea itself certainly draw our attention to stop and investigate the area.  We decided to avoid a freeway and get to the area through Joshua Tree National Park.  We cut across Joshua Tree National  park left Mojave desert and came out in Colorado desert right by Salton Sea.  As soon as we reached the area i noticed a strange and unpleasant  smell. The area had post apocalyptic look  with the surrounding structures standing in ruins.  The sea was the dull blue of a cataract, surrounded by small volcanoes, bubbling mud pots, and ragged, blank mountains used for bombing practice by the Navy and the Marines .  It was hard to imagine that once upon the time this area was known to be a paradise , "a germ in a desert ".  What happened here ?  why this area that was once flourishing with tourists, new constructions, yacht clubs and  hotels is now deserted and crumbling  ? To understand how this place turned from paradise to purgatory we need to know Salton Sea story.

Salton Sea is the most enigmatic areas in Southwest .  It is a largest lake in California. It lands between Palm Springs resorts and Mexican border.  Salton Sea came into being in 1905.  "It was an accident stemming from a canal that diverted water from the Colorado River to the agricultural area of the Imperial Valley. There was an overflow, an unplanned change of course, and an inland sea was born. The tributary to the Salton Sea continued fill the fledgling lake, eroding the banks of other nearby lakes, and soon sucking them away, quickly filling the new lake with the liquidy remains". By 1906 it was a fully fledged lake, and surveyors noted that several species of waterfowl and pelicans were nesting in the area. The lake continued to grow until Union Pacific closed the river breach, and cut off the tributary.  By 1950 salton sea area was booming .  It was a California version of "French rivera" , the area  quickly became a playground for rich and powerful.  The area used to have numerous luxury resorts, hotels, piers , yacht and thousand of visitors including celebrities like Frank Sinatra.  It was a same year 1950 when  California Department of Fish and Game made a concerted effort to stock the Salton Sea with fish.  Thousands were captured with large nets in the Gulf of California, and quickly released into the Sea.   The Salton Sea quickly became a fisherman’s paradise.  With all these new fish to eat, The Sea also became a new stopover point for migratory birds.  As California built cities on its coastal marshlands, the Salton Sea became a critical part of the Pacific Flyway, part time home to millions of birds.

"By the late 1960s the Sea was beginning a metamorphosis.  Rather than evaporating like a puddle in a parking lot as it had done over and over since prehistory, this time the Salton Sea stayed the same size.  As it turned out, the Imperial Valley farms were dumping irrigation runoff water into the sea at the same rate as evaporation–about 6 feet a year.  Unfortunately, salt and fertilizer don’t evaporate, so as the chemical-laden water from the farms poured into the basin, they combined with the already saline mixture of the Sea.  Since the Salton Sea has no outlet, the salt and chemical levels increased every year while the water level remained the same.  The Salton started to get murkier and murkier".

Then a cycle of bad things began.  The first was the algae that fed on the fertilizer in the run-off.  The vast, but short lived, algae fields created an enormous amount of rotten smelling, decaying matter as a natural part of its life cycle.  The stench, combined with the oppressive heat, was, and still is, completely overpowering.  Anyone with a sense of smell was forced to move away from the shoreline. Then came the floods.  "Tropical storm Kathleen pounded the Imperial Valley in 1976 with record-setting rainfall, and the water had no place to go except the Salton Sink.  In 1977, Tropical storm Doreen blew through the Imperial Valley, the second “100-year storm” in two years".  Floodwaters consumed the marinas and yacht clubs along the Sea’s shoreline. With its main income stream cut off, the local economies quickly collapsed and property values plummeted.  By the mid-’80s, the cities around the Sea were barely hanging by a thread. Whole flooded neighborhoods were just abandoned, and left to rot.

By the late 1980s, the wildlife die-offs began.  "First, the fish began dying in biblical numbers when the all-consuming algae depleted the oxygen from the water.  Feeding on the rotting fish, the birds contracted botulism.  Almost every year through the nineties, tens of thousands of dead fish and birds washed up on the shore of the Salton Sea.  When 150,000 Eared Grebes died in 1992, it was a disaster that completely overwhelmed the facilities of the Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge.  Their disposal incinerator ran 24 hours a day for months. The much smaller Brown Pelican die-off of the late nineties received massive media exposure and brought the plight of the Salton Sea into living rooms all across America.  In the summer of 1999, 7.6 million Tilapia died from oxygen starvation caused by the overabundant algae.  Their rotting carcasses rimmed parts of the Sea for over ten years. Combined with the decaying algae, it had to be smelled to be believed".

These days, in the 115-degree heat of summer the Sea stinks so bad that the reek sticks in your throat like Elmer’s Glue. Chemical-laced dust kicked up from its rapidly receding shoreline contributes to an asthma rate for local children three times higher than the state average. In the recent years because Salton Sea started shrinking and evaporating rapidly that will soon represent even e bigger health problem in Riverside county, Imperial Valley and even Los Angeles.  It is predicted that the shoreline will recede by  up to several miles, leaving at least 21,120 acres of sediments to the mercy of hot, dry winds.  Salton Sea mud contains enough arsenic and selenium to qualify for disposal in a dump reserved for the most toxic of society's trash. Chromium, zinc, lead and pesticides, including DDT, are also in the lake bottom.  The Salton Sea, the largest lake in California, encompasses about 380 square miles. It rests in one of the driest places in the nation. Gale-force winds are not uncommon.  
These toxic chemicals could attach themselves to the fine particles of sediment when the lake evaporates and be able to travel far with wind driven dust and  breathed by people. It believed that it could  potentially be a health hazard.

Presently there are a number of ambitious plans to try to save the Salton Sea. Birds still flock there, unaware of the dangerous chemicals of the water. Most people avoid it. It’s become so polluted that it’s a danger to eat anything that comes from it, and it’s a wildlife preserve.

Salton Sea have  been variously called a natural wonder, a national embarrassment, paradise, and the ecological equivalent of the Chernobyl disaster. And it’s only a hundred years old.



references:

Desert USA:  http://www.desertusa.com/salton/salton.html

Salton Sea :the Assessment by Victor M. Ponce:   http://saltonsea.sdsu.edu

Sordid history of the Salton Sea, by Jason Bellows: https://www.damninteresting.com/sordid-history-of-the-salton-sea/

Salton Sea : From Relaxing resort to Skeleton - Filled Wasteland , by Ella Morton: http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/02/04/the_salton_sea_in_california_turned_from_a_relaxing_resort_to_an_apocalyptic.html

Lost America: The Salton Sea: http://lostamerica.com/photo-items/the-salton-sea/

The Salton Sea: Death and Politics in the Great American Water Wars by Matt Simon:  http://www.wired.com/2012/09/salton-sea-saga/

The Shore of Salton Sea 

The Pelicans

 The Shore

Dead Tilapia in a water

Dead tilapia at the shore

 dead fish in a water

Pelicans 

Llano del Rio Story

Llano Del Rio

Article and photography by Natasha Petrosova 

I visited Ghost town, LLano del Rio.  It is located in what is now LLano, CA east of Palmade in Antelope Valley.  Its not hard to spot  brick structures driving down from the freeway.  I saw them, stopped the car and went in there to look for the remains of this  socialist community that less than a century ago was an optimistic vision of the future .  As i walked around I run in to some locals.  We got into conversation.  Locals call the remains of the structure a "brick  house".  I asked them if they knew about historical significance of the ground we stand on and what this "brick house" represents. They laughed shrug their shoulders and said " Its just a brick house, someone built it and it fell".   I learned that the remains of the brick  structure is visited by local youngsters  often.  It is a spot where teens hang out in the evenings, telling a joke , smoking a joint and having a beer.   But the story of LLano del Rio is significant one and it is a lot of history behind that story.   It is a very spot where social programs that were considered  Anti-American had developed a nearly century ago .   Today this historical site stands in ruins.  Regardless of its historical significance, this site  have been looted, vandalized and allowed to decay. Unfortunately, a Los Angeles County proposal seeking $100,000 in state funds to preserve the site was rejected . Scholars, as well as many Antelope Valley Residents fear that the last remains of this historical landmark that was found a nearly century ago will disappear and fade into history.   

LLano Del Rio Story 

If you will join me and a few other friends, we will build a city and build homes for many a homeless family. We will show the world a trick or two they do not know." 

- Job Harriman 

Most people have never heard about the old Californian socialist community, Llano Del Rio, or the name of its founder, Job Harriman, and even fewer  are aware of Harriman’s ideas and the impact they have had on American society . Llano Del Rio was small, short lived community implementing the social programs that  were then considered unAmerican .  Llano Del Rio developed and implemented the minimum wage, eight-hour work day, low-cost housing, social security, welfare, and strides toward universal health care .  The community's founder, Job Harriman sought to solve problems of unemployment and homelessness, and provide a better quality of life to  average citizens. He advocated free education and health care as well as  social reforms that continue benefitting the average man, to this day.   In his book “The Gateway to Freedom” Harriman wrote:

  "The average man is sustained through youth and early manhood by the illusion that ability or good fortune ultimately will reward him with a large share of wealth. Disillusionment comes when he awakens to the futility of his efforts. Frequently this comes after a struggle that has broken him in body and spirit before he has reached middle age.Years of unceasing toil result at best in only a few material rewards at the end of life. No one is secure against the hazards of possible, financial failure. No one has a guarantee against disemployment,poverty and suffering for their loved ones.In the turmoil of life the modern city is a battlefield    where the fierceness of competition crushes, maims and kills. Men and women gather day after day in such strife that only those whose instincts and raining fit them for successful trickery, or whose natures render continual vigilance possible, meet with any degree of success. Fort he masses failure is inevitable".

The Llano Del Rio story begins with a bomb explosion behind the Los Angeles Times Building in October 1910, which killed 20 employees and seriously injured 100 more. LA Times owner and publisher, Otis Chandler had been involved in a long and bitter fight with organized labor unions, and he immediately suspected that union members were behind for the crime. Chandler hired a detective who found evidence that labor organizers Ortie McManigal and McNamara Brothers were involved in the bombing. McManigal and Brothers were arrested and both plead not guilty. Socialist lawyer and Indiana politician, Job Harriman served as their defense counselor while also running for a mayor. His assistant, Clearance Darrow eventually took over the case, as  Harriman was busy running his mayoral campaign. Darrow convinced the accused to plead guilty in order to avoid the death penalty. They plead guilty just days before the election, and some contend that the timing ruined Harriman's chance of becoming mayor. After losing the election, Harriman and his supporters decided to establish a socialist colony. They purchased  land and water rights in the Mojave Desert, about 20 miles east of Palmdale, and in 1914 established the Llano Del Rio colony.  Harriman personally solicited individuals and families to become members of his new colony, and he bought advertisements in Western Comrade and the California Social-Democrat. To become colony members, participants had to purchase 2,000 shares of stock in the company; in the return they were promised a job, a home, a living wage, education, and health care. Over the next few years the colony grew rapidly, and by 1917 there were nearly 1,000 members. Members lived in tents as buildings were constructed that first year.  Community structures were designed by self-taught architect, Alice Constance Austin, also a feminist-socialist. Austin designed a circular community which included childcare facilities and homes without kitchens. Llano Del Rio was a self-governed community that consisted of 60 different committees reporting to a government board. By 1916 the community included two hotels, a boot factory, post office, print shop, and 75 acres of gardens, including hundreds of fruit trees, alfalfa, and grain. In just a short time, Llano Del Rio produced 90% of everything they needed to support the community. The colony also maintained the first and largest Montessori school with both a theater and orchestra. Llano Del Rio had a  rich cultural and intellectual life, and it became a home for artists, poets, musicians, writers and debate groups.  By 1917 it became apparent that their choice of location in the Antelope Valley was a mistake, since it was so remote; an earthquake that year left the community with an inadequate water supply, and they decided to find a new location. Later that year the entire colony was moved to a Stables, Louisiana, a former lumber town. They established the New Llano in Louisiana, and adapted to  new social and economic conditions there. New Llano remained in Stables for 22 years, but in 1939 a series of financial problems forced the colony into bankruptcy.   Llano documentary reminded us that neither republicans nor democrats originated socialist ideas such as welfare, universal health care, minimum wage or social security but rather, they were introduced 72 years prior at a remote desert socialist colony. In fact, decades before these issues became politically popular, many faced risks of jailing, beatings, or even deportation for promoting concepts which nowadays are fully integrated in to American society. Harriman believed that the United States would never implement any social programs or reforms unless it had an economic model such as Llano Del Rio on which to base them. He was right, and while many history books call Llano Del Rio an old Utopian community (faded and failed ideas, in essence) the social changes and reforms that eventually took place in United States occurred as a direct result of the   contributions of labor unions, socialists, and cooperative communities such as Llano Del Rio. 

References:

I.  Foster John and Alex Kirkish: Another Look at The Llano Del Rio Colony.   SCA proceedings, Volume 23, 2009 

II.  Harriman  Job: The Gateway to Freedom: Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony.  Colony Press     

      Department, Los Angeles, California, 1914

III. Lewis Beverly and Rick Blackwood:  American Utopia. Video-recording. 1995

Ruins of LLano del Rio

Ghost towns of California :Introduction

Ruins of bombay Beach

Ghost Towns of California : Introduction

Written by Natasha Petrosova 

A two-hour drive in any direction from the beautiful California coast, one

 will discover a mostly unseen, but rather peculiar side of the Golden State. Set

 apart from the trendy, sophisticated crowds, delightful weather, densely populated

 cities, and busy freeways, a half rural/half abandoned region of California offers an

 uncanny experience within its two great deserts, the Colorado and Mojave. The

 deserts are well known for their strenuous summers, old mining towns, deserted

 Salton Sea shores, abandoned military bases, and other offbeat attractions.

    What makes those desolated buildings, places, and towns in the middle of the 

desert so interesting to visit? Why do people travel countless miles to explore and 

photograph them? From an abandoned building to a deserted town, these places 

evoke feelings, and ignite the imagination to ponder the past and the future. They are

 full of history, and rich with memories; they hint at the journeys of early settlers, full

 of big dreams and even bigger failures; they bring up tales of towns and communities

that, for one reason or another, didn’t make it; and they offer us a suggestive glimpse

 to a post-apocalyptic future… what happens when we are gone? 

    Most fascinating, almost none of these abandoned places are technically

 abandoned. Towns like Johannesburg, Keeler, and Bombay Beach, for instance, all

 claim full-time residents.  Abandoned Navy Base, Camp Dunlap was transformed 

into Slab City, with more than 12,000 winter residents. Abandoned buildings draw 

frequent visitors, tempted to explore what lies within their walls. Some of the 

buildings serve as a permanent residence for wildlife, and a temporary rest stop for

 passing drifters. 

         I visited these places, and this is what I found...