Abandoned Places – SoCal Abandoned Trip #2 – The Salton Sea
The North Shore Yacht Club – Outside
Back in January, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
eightwednesday and I gathered a group of the SoCal Abandoned folks together and visited one of the most amazing abandonments in the region – the communities fading away along the edges of The Salton Sea. Due to more than a few reasons, our party was smaller than anticipated but very motivated. For example, I drove an hour and half just to pick up one person and then two more hours to get to the meet up site for the group.
The North Shore Yacht Club
For those who haven’t read about it, The Salton Sea is California’s largest inland body of water (in area not volume), and it’s all there due to a monumental accident. In 1908 a levee holding back the Colorado River broke and began filling what had previously been a dry wash that lay mostly below sea-level. By 1912, an area the size of Los Angeles was covered with water up to a depth of 40 feet (13m). By the 1920’s, word spread about the massive lake and people began building cottages close to the water and using the area for recreation. In the 1940’s, work of this “paradise” spread and developers began building motels, resorts and tourist facilities. In addition, the farming communities south of the lake were thriving. What could possibly go wrong?
Towards the playground
What went wrong was over 50 years of not just poor planning but no planning at all. The Salton Sea has two inlets and no outflow. What gets there, stays there. This included pollutants, agricultural run off and minerals leeched from the soil below the lake. By the 1970’s the salinity of the Salton and the pollution levels contributed to massive die-offs by fish introduced to the lake. Swimming or even wading were highly discouraged by the 1980’s, and the communities along the shore began to suffer or fold up.
No Escape
BTW, this is my son and the photographer of the previously posted set of images.
Heading back to the Yacht Club
North Shore was a small tourist community closest to the Palm Springs area. Like several other communities along The Salton, is has a living and a dead section of town (people do still live in the “abandoned” areas, but very few).. North Shore’s Yacht Club and Motel kept going until the late 1980’s
Bait, snacks, hardware - ruins
This was the first of many shoes we found throughout the day
At the front of the building
The pool at the back of the club (and yes, those are clothes drying on the fence)
Looking inside the North Shore Yacht Club next
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
abandonedplaces,
accomplished
