David Zimmerman. People stopped coming to the salton sea. Vacation homes were abandoned, resort developments stopped in mid construction. Neighborhoods to be, never were. The Salton Sea is one of the most enigmatic places in the Southwestan otherworldly lake in the barren, naked desert, sandwiched between the resorts of Palm Springs. Castcrew information with user comments, ratings, and other background details. The Salton Sea Lost America. The Salton Sea is one of the most enigmatic places in the Southwestan otherworldly lake in the barren, naked desert, sandwiched between the resorts of Palm Springs and the Mexican border. Its languid surface, at 2. Death Valley.   This former resort region had its heyday during the early 1. Los Angeles and San Diego metropolitan areas. For a time, the Sea was a haven for boaters and fishermen. Today, the few people who remain are hardy individualist types looking for isolation and a cheap place to live. The air is heavy with heat and decay. Its a lonely, haunted place. A large part of the town of Salton Sea Beach was inundated during the floods of 1. Night shooting these neighborhoods twenty years later found a desolate quagmire peppered with block after block of abandoned trailers, homes and businesses. The ground was covered with a jagged white crust glowing brightly in the moonlight. Every few steps itd crack under your weight, sinking you ankle deep, into the stinking mud. Somnolent flies stirred to life in black clouds with every step. On the shoreline, a few unrecognizable cars rested up to their doorhandles in the sludgy water. Their bodies covered with a rocky crust, like a once submerged reef poking out of a calm sea. The rotten trailers and buildings were explosively hot inside, even hours after sundown. Their tattered curtains swayed in the evil smelling breeze as thousands of birds cawed at the swollen moon. The North Shore Marina gas station lay half underwater. A shoreline riddled with thousands of dead fish, eyes glowing in the pale blue moonlight. Meanwhile, the nearby international style motel exuded a quiet film noir air of mystery, its windows and doors boarded up. The long, low, L shaped building was finally torn down in 2. ZYRdi9rSTQM/hqdefault.jpg' alt='Watch The Salton Sea Full Movie' title='Watch The Salton Sea Full Movie' />Along the southeastern shore near Niland sits an old adobe resort, dating back to the 1. Once the isolated retreat of the rich, it now sits far too close to the water in a field of thick, shoe sucking mud. The adobe walls are slowly melting back into the earth. Mosquitoes run rampant here in the primordial marshlands, quickly attacking any skin left uncovered. For the past several million years, the lowlands of the Salton Sink had been repeatedly filled by floods whenever the nearby Colorado River jumped its banks. Sometimes these resulting prehistoric seas would become large enough to join the Gulf of California over 1. Because of the oppressive heat in the region, they would quickly evaporate. The most recent of these inland seas, called Lake Cahuilla, dried up over 4. All this ebb and flow made the Salton Sink rich with salts and other minerals. Commercial salt mining began in 1. Isolated and stupefyingly hot more than 1. The Accidental Flood and its Unexpected Benefits. In 1. 89. 6, the privately owned California Development CompanyCDC built a canal to siphon water from the Colorado River to irrigate the barren region to the south of the Salton Sink. That region would eventually become the Imperial Valley. By the turn of the century, their plan was right on schedule. The valley had become a huge crop producing region with settlers pouring in by the thousands. In February of 1. CDCs empire. By 1. The CDC hastily built a second canal. When that clogged, they built a third. That year in what would later be determined to be an El Nino weather pattern the Southwest experienced its wettest season on record. The flooding on the Colorado was immense, causing it to breach its dikes and flood all three canals. Political infighting and eventually, financial insolvency crippled the companys efforts to stanch the catastrophic flow. The entire volume of the Colorado River poured into the sink, unimpeded for over 1. At times, the water flowed at over 1. Four separate projects were started to try and stop the hemorrhaging river all ending in failure. Finally, 3,0. Practically overnight, Southern California had an enormous inland sea. At 3. 80 square miles, it became the largest body of water in the state. However, this new sea did not quickly recede like it had in the past. Agricultural drainage from the new farms in the Imperial Valley to the south kept water flowing into the newly christened Salton Sea. The Navy opened the Salton Sea Test Base in 1. During the war, it served as a training base for seaplane operations. In 1. B 2. 9s, including the Enola Gay, secretly flew in from Wendover, Nevada and dropped dummies of the atomic bomb at the Test Base as practice for their Hiroshima run. Abandoned since the mid seventies, the SSTB was used for live fire military training exercises through the eighties, completely destroying all the structures at the facility. Today the Test Base is surrounded by signs warning of unexploded bombs and is almost inaccessible due to encroaching sand dunes burying long sections of the access road. In the spring of 2. I carried my mountain bike over the dunes and rode into the base. As I expected, all the base buildings were gone and the long seaplane pier had been bombed down to its pilings. The only structures still evident were the concrete ordinance storage bunkers. As I rode out of the SSTB late that night, my tripod slung over my shoulder, several Apache attack helicopters on maneuver buzzed me repeatedly. No doubt I was leaving an infra red trail visible in their night scopes. Another military installation, Camp Dunlop, stood on the Seas east shore, near the town of Niland. Part of Pattons Third Army Desert Training Center during WWII, it was completely abandoned and razed by the early 1. Today this 6. 40 acre site is a huge squatters camp. Known as Slab City because of the hundreds of concrete foundations left from the camps buildings, these level slabs are the perfect size to fit an RV. While its free, the lack of water, electricity and other services keeps The Slabs primitive. To the handful of year round Slabbers, mostly retired people on limited incomes, its a matter of preserving a freedom loving way of life. There are not many places left where a person can just pick a spot and park indefinitely. For them, its an Eden with few expenses and no one to answer to. To most people, its Hellishly hot and economically devastated. Summertime finds it a harsh place, populated by a band of survivalists, misfits and loners. At night it takes on a Road Warrior atmosphere with numerous bonfires blazing among the patchwork of tents and overturned cars. In the winter months, Slab Citys personality changes as snowbirds in their giant RVs swell the population to 5,0. In 1. 95. 0, the 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. A few species survived, and the Orangemouth Corvina flourished. The Salton Sea quickly became a fishermans paradise. With all these new fish to eat, The Sea also became a new stopover point for migratory birds. How I Met Your Mother Season 8 Full Length Episodes on this page. 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. While the Imperial Valley continued as a bustling agricultural center through WWII, the Salton Sea area remained relatively unpopulated. But once air conditioning made the deserts habitable to more people, it didnt take long for entrepreneurs to recognize the Salton Seas potential. With a clear blue inland sea and a year round hot climate within a couple of hours drive of the Los AngelesSan Diego megalopolis, how could people stay away  Seeing the explosive growth of nearby Palm Springs, developers envisioned the Salton Sea as a desert Lake Tahoe or a Palm Springs on the Beach. By 1. Golf courses began to appear everywhere. Thousands showed up to watch the Salton Sea 5.