Last winter the staff of Cruiser discovered, over multiple trips, the ins, outs and joys of Salton Sea and the Coachella Valley. Unless you're a big golfer, the Greater Palm Springs Area isn't somewhere that appears on too many people's radars for a hot spot... or perhaps it doesn't show up because it is such a hot spot. But in the winter (SoCal's rainy season), in the rain shadow of the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains, it's usually warm and dry, which for people looking for a good spot to get in and out of with some stunning photography, it fit the bill for us just fine. What we didn't expect was stunning landscapes, some challenging roads in the mountains bordering the valley, and a fascinating population living in a surreal world, that seems so much further from the metropolis of Los Angeles.
Just for the record, I frickin hate the Mojave Desert. For those who think its desolate moonscape is beautiful... well I just don't get it. So if you think this is one of those stories that celebrates the nothing that is the drive between Barstow and Vegas, it's not. Maybe I've had one too many quick trips to Vegas to party, maybe it was dirt bike riding in it as a kid, whatever, it's got zero charm for me. Unless there are big colorful mountains, alien-looking salt flats, or large bodies of water, I'm totally not interested.
So when I called Mike Calabro last fall about doing a photo shoot by the Salton Sea, really just thinking about hitting all of the mountain roads on the dry side of the mountains, and not even considering the Sea itself, I was surprised when he started raving about Slab City, and Bombay Beach, and how cool this was all going to be.
So we did our "Baby Bagger Shootout" (Motorcycle Cruiser, April 2009) there, and went back for our $10k Bargain Big Bikes Test (MC, June 2009), and (for good measure), I went back once more in February (in magazine-time that would be about the time of the July issue of MC) to really explore the space and focus on touring there without the distractions of trying to test motorcycles. Unlike most touring articles, this isn't a blow-by-blow of "we did this, we did that" as we're compiling a few different trips, but more a few ideas on where to go and what to do in the area.
 The "hidden" parts of Salvation...  The "hidden" parts of Salvation Mountain are the best part with hay bales, tires and tree branches anchoring the tons of adobe and paint to make a Dr. Seussesque series of chambers that feels like it's inside the mountain. |  |  Fossilized mollusks hang from...  Fossilized mollusks hang from a bird's feather on the beach at Salton Sea Recreation Area. |
They'd call it the Dead Sea, but that name was taken...The Salton Sea is an oddity on many levels. Millions of years ago, it was the northernmost arm of the Sea of Cortez (aka the Gulf of California), but at some point it was cut off from the rest of the Sea by the Colorado's delta. After that it's gone through periods of lake and sink, with the changing course of the Colorado, appearing as either a large inland sea or a desolate stretch of desert well below sea level. In any case, by the time the white folk got here, it was a desert.
However, all that changed in 1905 when heavy snowmelt in the Colorado combined with heavy spring rain cased the Colorado to burst through a dike and flow once more into (what was then known as) the Salton Sink. Two years (and a couple zillion gallons ) later, the Army Corps of Engineers fixed the breach, and the Salton Sea was born. The comedy of errors didn't end there though.
In the 1920s it became the "California Riviera" with beach resorts sprouting up all over. Sea birds began migrating here to eat the fish species introduced by man for sport. By the 1950s and 60s, agricultural runoff with nowhere to escape, started to raise the level of salinity, which in turn killed off whole species of fish, which then started killing the birds, all of which started dying off en mass. Meanwhile the same runoff caused foul-smelling floods at the seaside resorts and the place began to earn a bad name for itself.