You invite a couple of Australian hydrologists with a reputation for irrigating large tracts of Australia to come and do a similar project in Southern California. There’s a suitable river not too far away, the rock is soft, gravity and topography are all in their favour. The Coffey brothers set to and dig a canal to plunder the flow from the Rio Colorado, the same Colorado that is carving out the Grand Canyon. Initially it proves a successful project: 100,000 acres are irrigated; so successful that to protect their investments, the investors decide that the desert greening could easily be increased substantially by the addition of a further two feeder canals. Only the problems are already starting to build up; for the new agri-oasis is 200 feet below sea level, there’s no outflow. The agricultural run-off and the river sediments are fast creating an ecological disaster. What was a geological depression is now an agrochemical sump. Not deterred, the canals are dug… in Mexico, without the consent of that country’s national government.

It’s now that nature steps in and does that which it does best: puncturing Man’s infinite hubris. A wet winter high in the sierras bloats the river, which bursts out and cuts a new channel; not to the sea, but with the obvious aid of gravity, down into all that low lying land. That sump becomes a Sea, The Salton Sea.

Not to be deterred, the Aussie navvies reconstruct the now-flooded railway and for sixteen months haul rocks into the breach, even dumping the rail cars onto the heap at the finish, so convinced were they that they had thwarted nature. Declaring that the New Sea would recede and disappear within the year.

All this occurred over a century ago. The Salton Sea is still here.
This is our second visit to this aberration, taking a few days detour to come back deliberately to wander around it, to walk it’s strands – not of sand not even of pebbles but of salt barnacles and fish bones. These a case of classical bio-transfers; the former arrived on the floats of sea-planes and the latter as fish farm escapees.
It’s a poignant place as we scrunch the drift dunes of fish bones and dead Tilapia, the sea’s skin a placid glutinous silence, spatter-dashed by hatching waterbugs, that leaves an ominous primordial echo. A solitary white heron stalks the margin, disturbed, it gives an indignant croak and languidly relocates further along the shore-line. But on a stormy day this Sea takes on a different persona, or at least a different smell; then the bed sediments are disturbed and a sulphurous odour pervades. It’s that which I remember from our last visit; part knacker’s yard, part fishing port, part off-eggs.

Sifting through the detritus on the tideless margin, I manage to uncover a rod complete with spinning reel and nylon line, encased in a crusted scab of salt and barnacles. A modern archeological find: from the age of Bakelite, circa 1950, from a time when this seashore was the holiday playground for the Los Angelinos. Two hurricanes and the ever increasing salination has killed off those aspirations, along with a dropping sea level that now leaves the marina dock and boat ramp stranded high and dry.

Maybe with further water loss the old railway track, the salt extraction plant, the irrigation ditches and fruit tree stumps will reappear just as those 19th century developers predicted, only a century later.

For now it should remain as a salutary monument, a reminder that Nature will always prevail given time. For that one idea alone, makes a visit worthwhile.