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SALTON SEA, CA
Down near the Mexican border, some 236 feet below sea level, a once-vast lake appears adrift in the desert like a fading mirage. In the early 1900s, a breach in two irrigation canals sent the entire volume of the Colorado River pouring onto a dry lake bed then known as the “Salton Sink.” Biblical-style flooding followed, surging unabated for nearly two years. Decades later, runoff from “seaside” farms flowed into the lake, regularly replenishing this improbable paradise.
BOMBAY BEACH
One hour down Highway 111 from Palm Springs — just past Mecca — lies the almost-ghost town of Bombay Beach, a rough-hewn holy land where art is religion, gilded in rust. A five-by-eight-block rectangle of ruins and renewal, population: 224. On every block, artists have repurposed broken trailers and vacant houses into graffiti-clad art galleries.
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PERMANENT EPHEMERA
Back in the Rat Pack era, celebrities water-skied right up to the “Ski Inn,” a jovial dive bar that still serves cocktails and home cooking despite the shrinking shoreline, now barely visible in the distance. Along the beach, surreal ruins stand mired in the landscape like a mud version of Pompeii — a testament to the relentless rains of the 1970s that suddenly swelled the lake and swallowed the town. Yet today, the enclave is rising again from the dust and cracked clay, repurposing desolation into a blank canvas for creative expression.
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“The Bombay Beach Biennale is a renegade celebration of art, music, and philosophy that takes place on the literal edge of Western civilization—the shores of the Salton Sea. It was founded in 2015 as a public arts event untethered from the commercial art world of galleries, museums, and art fairs, and as a tool to amplify the largely unknown and ignored ecological crisis of the Salton Sea.”
— Bombay Beach Biennale
The Biennale is an entirely free and public happening. Everything is open to anyone who can find their way to Bombay Beach. Weekly programming includes workshops, music and dance performances, open-air opera, film screenings, and outdoor art installations.
“While in season, the Bombay Beach Biennale transforms the abandoned housing, vacant lots, and decaying shoreline of the Salton Sea into a unique canvas for creative expression, social practice, and critical thought.” This includes a “drive-in theater” by artists Stefan Ashkenazy and Sean Dale Taylor, who gathered rusted cars from Imperial Valley scrap yards and “parked” them facing a movie screen—aka the side of a semi-trailer painted white.
The official “Biennale Season” starts on January 1 each year and concludes with a celebratory weekend in the spring, the exact dates of which are spread only by word of mouth. There are Airbnb options, as well as ample outdoor space for tent camping and RVs. Come enjoy high art at the lowest point in America.
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FINDING SALVATION
More than 100,000 gallons of paint and 22 years of toil were devoted to one man’s mission of love. Leonard Knight was part artist, part evangelist, and part dreamer who walked the walk — and he could hoist a hay bale up a two-story ladder by himself! Hay bales were to him what giant stones were to the ancient Egyptians. But rather than a pyramid, Leonard built a mountain out of adobe clay mixed with hay, then painted it with scenes of rivers, waterfalls, flowers, and proclamations that “God Is Love.”
Image courtesy of salvationmountain.org
He maintained that “love is the strongest force on Earth” and was determined to get that message out for the world to see. Thus began his mission to build Salvation Mountain, complete with a painted yellow brick road leading to giant 3-D letters at its peak spelling out “GOD IS LOVE.” His masterpiece also includes an adobe “igloo” supported by a “tree pillar” made of stacked truck tires and found branches — its interior, of course, decorated in his signature colors-of-love style.
Located on the outskirts of Niland, near Slab City, Salvation Mountain is open to all, from dawn to dusk.
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SAVE OUR SEA
The Salton Sea is beautiful but tragic. Pollution from agricultural runoff and other factors has rendered its beauty unsafe. Nearly twice as salty as the Pacific Ocean, it is now largely avoided by both native and migrating wildlife. It is evaporating faster than it can be replenished and may literally become a mirage in the not-so-distant future. And then there’s the airborne toxic dust kicked up from its now-dry shoreline that can reach Palm Springs and even Los Angeles.
Conservation efforts to establish new wetlands offer some hope, while bolder proposals to refill the Salton Sea using water from the Sea of Cortez dare us to dream of a renewed and flourishing paradise — like the version where Frank Sinatra and Desi Arnaz vacationed a half-century ago.
Salton Sea Conservancy
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