wow, I really really want to skate that pool.

Get a tetanus shot first.

Even though some of the man-made items at the Yacht Club look unhealthy :yet make awesome photos, the natural scene there is lovely. It looks very peaceful and calming.

The Salton Sea is a trip - total David Lynch territory. It's peaceful in a really weird way - like walking on the moon is probably peaceful. The lake is actually more or less man-made. It's out in the desert near Palm Springs and there are all these date palm plantations in the middle of nowhere, like you're in the desert in North Africa and there's oases with bedouins there.

This Salton Sea thing. I find it haunting. My dad befriended one of his co workers at Avery Label. He had a boat and two sons. We went out to the Salton Sea many a weekend and water skied. I once wore goggles and swam around. There's a world under the sea of creepy houses that were swallowed up. I guess Sean Penn's been filming out there. He's doing a film based on the airport book of all airprot books: Into The WIld.

That looks eerie yet serene, like a graveyard picnic. I think I feel a road-trip coming on.

some nice pix john- i take it that was a couple years back as the yacht club and marina vista motel have since been leveled. i used to live in salton city back in the late 80's. a very bizarre place for an orange county boy to reside in. i definitely found the ugly pink underbelly if the southwest and white trash civilization in general. i decided i was too young to hook up with a local speedqueen and impregnate her for a welfare card and gubment cheese. i reside a mere 35 miles west of there today in a more "respectable" corner of the colorado desert. and yes chuck- mister penn was in salton city and borrego recreating the infamous "oh my god hot springs" where that stupid +into the wild" kid spent part of his journey. an everett reuss this wayward son was not...

Just saw Into the Wild... have seen Chuck many times... lovely both. Wrote my dissertation, at UCSC, on the Imperial Valley and necessarily included a great deal on the Sea... socionatural 'disaster' (has anyone read the book or seen the silent film "The Winning of Barbara Worth"? glorious turn-of-the-last-century melodrama), fed by irrigation run-off --> equilibration of evaporation and run-off, stocked by the state, developed by entertainment/retirement developers, flooded by too much irrigation (needed to flush salts left in the soil by earlier irrigation out of the soil), regular state and federal predications of the Sea's death, IID punished for wasting water, IID forced to market water - in exchange for money to build water conservation infrastructures with LA and, later, SD, now it appears the Sea's dying faster - certainly fish and birds are dying more frequently, but nobodies doing anything about it... too costly by far. I loved my night at Slab City, tho... a night in Calipatria before the prison was pretty cool, too... way better than that cheap hotel in El Centro, but not as nice as the classic, desert-populist downtown in Brawley.

the sea is a sore subject with me. i lived there in the late 80's and was a member of SOS (save our sea) committee, the sad truth at that time was this yuppie congresswoman whose district covered newport bay (she live on lido isle) to the imperial valley DIDNT EVEN KNOW THE SALTON SEA WAS THERE. by the time folks get their fucking shit together on this sad body of water- it will be way too late. ive never seen anything go to shit so fast in my lifetime. what will bring this disaster to masses is toxic dust storms affecting imperial valley and the putrid stench will become unbearable to the millions of country clubbers in the greater palm desert/la qunita area..

more pitiful glimpses of this area on my BEYOND THE SEA "travelogues" on brink trippin' (shameless plug #29)

Hey Zog: I'll definitely check out Beyond the Sea - I'm sure you saw the Plagues and Pleasures documentary, eh? When I attended the first Salton Sea Authority meeting in ninety-whateveritwas there appeared to be some possible movement... and then that fizzled, too. What REALLY pissed me off was that the IID-MWD/SDCWA transfers were initially proposed by the purported environmentalists at the Environmental Defense Fund... in the name of reducing the "inefficient" use of water in desert agriculture, the EDF joined the state and MWD in a program sure to accelerate the death of the Sea and intensify growth in greater LA. I believe these guys see the Sea as fake/man-made nature and won't mourn its death, despite the fact that such an occurrence will destroy the last viable and major stop-over in Southern California for migratory waterfowl - many endangered - on the Avian Pacific Flyway. I expect nothing but more of the same given the state of CA's fiscal crises and the destruction of the federal treasury over the last 8 years.