History
After the Flood
An epic tale of man versus nature in the harsh California desert.
By John Warren
In 1950 the Salton Sea, the second-largest inland body of water in the United States, was empty.
Freshwater fish couldn’t live in the briny water, and there had been many failed attempts to introduce saltwater fish.
Striped bass were imported and died off in 1929. Fifteen thousand silver salmon were introduced in 1934, never to be seen again. Maybe the saltwater wasn’t right; it was salty, like the ocean, but the salts weren’t the same mix. And the temperatures varied widely in the sea, from 50 degrees in one spot, to 100 degrees in another. But most of all, the food chain didn’t exist.
During the ill-fated attempt to introduce striped bass, game warden Eddie Glidden dumped in a few buckets of pile worms — wriggly, reddish, centipede-looking creatures. The World War I veteran and career game warden figured if he was dumping fish into the sea, they’d need something to eat.
A team of California Department of Game and Fish biologists went to the Gulf of California, casting big nets. Thirty-five species of fish — 34,000 fish total — were loaded into tanks and trucked to the Salton Sea.
In went wrasse, halibut, totoaba, Gulf croaker, bonefish, anchoveta, roosterfish, two species of corvina, pompano, halibut, white and silver perch, bonefish, smelt, mojarra, grunion, and sardine. California officials trucked in more fish, in December 1950 and again the next year, and a couple more times in subsequent years.
Several of the species — tilapia, sargo, corvina, croaker — survived, and started to spawn. Had “The Great Fish Dump” worked — and if so, why now, at long last?
Best anyone could tell, because of Eddie Glidden. Glidden’s worms had survived and thrived, creating the long-sought-after food-chain catalyst the sea had needed.
Glidden’s contribution was the completion of a simple-yet-perfect ecosystem that began with plankton and organic matter at the sea’s bottom, food enough for the pile worms, which were eaten by the tilapia and the croaker; the tilapia and croaker by the corvina. Extended further, the fish fed the migratory birds, which in time arrived at the sea in biblical numbers.
In summer 1957, University of California biologists declared the sea would be a fisherman’s paradise in short order. UCLA’s Boyd W. Walker, who led a Salton Sea study financed by the state Department of Fish and Game, heralded the orange corvina, which could top 30 pounds.
“It has everything necessary for a game fish,” Walker wrote. “Some man is going to have the thrill of making the first big catch.”
Eddie Glidden never knew the happenstance of his enduring contribution. He died in 1949, the year before The Great Fish Dump.
Fish Lures Man
Then, as now, the desert was a white-hot griddle during the summer months. But from October into March, the Salton Sea basin was glorious: temperatures in the 60s and 70s, clear air, an impossibly brilliant blue sky, shimmering water set off by citrus trees and date palms at its shores, and ice-capped mountains on the horizon.
By the late 1950s, there were so many millions of tilapia and croaker in the Salton Sea, it was said bait was a luxury; the fish would jump at a hook out of mere curiosity.
On weekends, thousands came in their cars, hauling boats on trailers. At one launch point, Fish Springs, 300 boats launched in only two days. Boats graced the sea, campgrounds lined the shores. There was powerboat racing, water skiing, fishing, and birdwatching.
Migratory birds became part of the bounty, and the sea was declared a state park and recreation area. Over 400 bird species were identified — more than half the species in North America — with populations on any given day in the millions. They included grand birds such as wood storks, great blue herons, brown pelicans, and snowy egrets.
The North Shore Beach and Yacht Club was built. Frank Sinatra came. So did Bing Crosby, and the Beach Boys, and Jerry Lewis, and the Marx Brothers. And, prophetically, Sonny Bono. Desi Arnaz and Harry James were among those who enjoyed the golf course, which semi-successfully defied the desert climate. The turf was green, albeit pale green.
M. Penn Phillips also came — a cigar-chomping real estate hustler, but with a track record of accomplishment. He paved 250 miles of road on 19,600 acres in the desert; planted thousands of palm trees; ran water, sewer, and power lines; built the Salton Bay Yacht Club; and a motel. He branded his new city, Salton City, as “The Salton Riviera,” and talked of the amenities to come amid the sure prospect of rising property values from the exploding Southern California population.
“It may well be that this entirely new resort area — bigger than Capri and Monaco and Palm Beach combined — will become the most valuable piece of resort property on Earth,” Phillips’ sales literature gushed.
Easy, owner financing; low-low monthly payments. $3,500 for a tract; only $250 down. Unless you care to upgrade to the corner lot with a water view …
Opening day, May 21, 1958, Phillips and his 300-person-strong sales force tallied $4.5 million in sales. Biplanes flew overhead, and as giddy Dons and Judys pointed to a tract of land below, a radio call went to someone on the ground, and a “sold” sign was planted. Millions of dollars poured into the area from bird watching, fishing, and hunting revenue. In 1958, attendance numbers at the sea were higher than at Yosemite National Park.
It was a mercurial half-life. And within a few years, it was over.
The Shape of Water
Almost 300 feet below sea level, surrounded on three sides by mountains, the geographical region known as the Salton Trough was predisposed toward collecting water from its benefactor to the south, the Colorado River.
The shadow of ancient Lake Cahuilla remains — a water line that seems painted on the Chocolate Mountains. At its peak, Lake Cahuilla filled an area several times larger than the Salton Sea. It’s thought as many as 100,000 Native Americans may have lived around the great lake, among them the Cahuilla.
The first European contact was the Juan Bautista Agustin expedition in 1774. But by the time gold prospectors trudged through the Salton Trough, progressively shedding the burden of their packed goods along the way, Lake Cahuilla had been reduced to a chronic phenomenon of smaller, shallow lakes, the last of which dried up around 400 years ago. Periodically, the Colorado River would abandon its normal course to the Gulf of California and fill the basin.
When geologist William Blake surveyed the area in the 1850s, he observed that the soil was primed for agriculture. “The only apparent reason for its sterility is the absence of water,” he noted.
Blake was the first to suggest deepening a channel of the New River so water from the Colorado could be diverted, creating a year-round source of irrigation.
He was also the first to fret about the prospect of an irrigation overflow that would refill the basin where Lake Cahuilla had been hundreds of years before. “In prehistoric times,” he scribbled in his notes, “the Colorado River turned northwest of its own accord and created a lake which was 105 miles long, 35 miles wide and over 300 feet deep.”
In fact, the great flood that was to come — the flood that would create the modern-day Salton Sea — had been warned of by generations of Cahuilla, and then by a “test run” in 1891, when one of the Colorado’s chronic overflows created a lake 30 miles long, 10 miles wide, and 6 feet deep.
Within two years, the lake had dried up. In its wake, it left a 7-inch layer of sodium and magnesium chlorides in the Salton basin; one needed only to scrape the surface to harvest salt. The New Liverpool Salt Company exploited its riches, building rail lines into the basin, shipping salt to West Coast markets.
Rockwood’s Folly
It required a perfect storm of greed and bad luck to set the chain of events into place that would realize Blake’s prophecy. It came in the form of the California Development Company — on a scale Blake couldn’t have imagined.
In 1892, an engineer named Charles Rockwood was dispatched to investigate the irrigation potential of the desert. He declared a canal project could irrigate 2 million acres of desert with drainage into the Salton Sink — a low area within the Salton Trough.
Rockwood — variously portrayed by historical accounts as both visionary and villain — struggled for almost 20 years to forge the partnerships that would make this canal a reality. By 1900, the California Development Company was real, and within three years, 120,000 acres of “reclaimed” land in the Imperial Valley was under cultivation. The population boomed, with more than 10,000 people.
In 1905, the floodgates had clogged with silt. Desperate to restore irrigation to the Imperial Valley, Rockwood’s California Development Company cut an opening, “the Mexican cut,” intending to close it before the spring floods. The timing of periodic flooding from the Colorado River was predictable — late spring or early summer. But the volume wasn’t, as the snowmelts that feed the river vary greatly from year to year.
A big and early flood swept down the river in spring 1905, obliterating the Mexican cut. No one could find a way to close it, and Rockwood’s irrigation ditch soon became a mile wide. The Colorado filled the Salton Sink, bolstered by more flooding in 1906.
The Southern Pacific railroad, whose tracks had been inundated, finally stopped it. But for two years, from February 1905 to February 1907, the great flood flowed unchecked. At its end, it created the Salton Sea: 400 square miles, 40 miles long, 13 miles wide, and, at its deepest point, 56 feet deep.
“They thought it would just dry up, but it didn’t,” said Linda Beal, a Salton Sea historian whose father, Ben, helped introduce tilapia to the sea.
But the New and Alamo rivers, tributaries of the Colorado, continued to feed the sea, as did irrigation runoff.
“The Salton Sea is a lesson in the planetary limits of human ability,” surmises UC Riverside doctoral student Todd Luce, several years into writing his history dissertation on the Salton Sea.
“Imbalance and dynamism are part and parcel of the landscape,” Luce said. “Now add human beings and their belief they can engineer the landscape to suit the needs of every stakeholder. It can’t be done.”
Arguably, the biggest problem with the Salton Sea is that it keeps getting saltier and progressively less hospitable to saltwater sea life.
As the basin was filled and drained naturally over thousands of years, the evaporation of these chronic inland lakes left salt.
For the past 100-plus years, runoff from agricultural fields has concentrated salts and minerals already in the water and added more, as well as nutrients and chemicals. Several million tons of salt are added to the sea every year. The desert sun also evaporates more than a million acre-feet of water annually, further concentrating chemicals including salt.
The ideal salinity level for saltwater fish is 3.5%. Around the time of the flood, the Salton Sea had a salinity level of 0.3%.
The biologists who studied the sea in the 1950s knew what was coming; they thought it would happen sooner than it did. Walker’s team figured everything would be dead by 1990.
By the mid-1990s, the salinity was 4.5%; today it’s more than 6%, and it could reach 9% by 2023. The rise in salinity has exacerbated the sea’s longstanding phenomena of fish die-offs and stink, a byproduct of the weird chemical cocktail that comprises the sea.
M. Penn Phillips was the first to get out, in 1960, taking his biplanes and billboards with him. Two flash floods in the 1970s damaged the yacht clubs and wiped out cottages and trailer parks. That was the death knell for most of the true believers and diehards.
Entertainer-turned-U.S. Rep. Sonny Bono, a Republican from Palm Springs, talked of bringing the sea back better than ever. He wanted the sea to become “a premier destination resort and residence opportunity,” with floating island marinas, shoreline development, and first-class resort amenities.
Many say that, when Bono died on a ski slope in 1998, the prospects for a renewed Salton Sea died with him.
In 2018, the Salton Sea’s Colorado River water was diverted to San Diego’s thirsty reservoirs, among others, and the shoreline’s retreat compounded. The boat docks are dry; you can only launch what you can carry to the water line, a rowboat or small sailboat.
The sea is empty again, save for an occasional sighting of croaker and tilapia.
Suspended History
Off Route 86 in Thermal, past fields of cabbage and John Deere-green harvesters, there is a pink-stucco office building in the middle of agricultural fields. Inside are the modest holdings of the erstwhile Salton Sea History Museum.
“It’s like spelunking in here,” said Julia Hause, climbing over the rows of cardboard boxes.
Hause, then a UCLA archival studies student, took on the task of cataloguing the holdings of the museum. It was housed for a time at the county-renovated North Shore Beach and Yacht Club, then shifted locations before being boxed up about five years ago.
Almost all the museum’s artifacts fit inside boxes. There are stereoscopic slides, matchbooks, old pennants, and lots of advertising for the “Salton Riviera.”
The museum, like the sea, is in a state of purgatory.
The cracked asphalt streets of never-realized Salton City are accented only with street signs. Curbing and the parched nubs of palm trees are all that’s left of the Salton Bay Yacht Club.
Along 86, billboards are emblazoned with capital letters in “look at me” colors. Someone is trying to sell you a tract of land. The terms look awfully familiar.
Easy, owner financing; low-low monthly payments. $3,500 for a tract; only $250 down. Unless you care to upgrade to the corner lot with a water view …
