Tucson - the Low Road

A More Interesting Way to Palm Springs

Rather than go back to Palm Springs on Interstate 10, we took the low road on 8, along the Mexican border and swung up around the western shores of the Salton Sea.

It's a much more interesting route.

We saw a lot of sharp, colorful mountain ranges as well as fields of cotton.

We stopped in a town called Dateland, Arizona which is fifty miles shy of Yuma.  The town grows eight varieties of dates and specialize in the Medjool variety.  We bought some dates and some oatmeal date cookies, which were really soft and tasty.  Neither of us tried the specialty - a milk shake made with dates.

Further along the road bisects a classical desert, the kind that is nothing but blowing sand and dunes.  A chain link fence running alongside the highway divided the US from Mexico.  We had to make a few stops at roadside Immigration checkpoints.  I assume they were looking for illegal aliens,

After lunch in Yuma, we made a sharp right turn north.  We stopped at the Salton Sea.  It's not a sea at all, but a lake - the largest in California and strangely - the result of an accident.

In the early 1900's water was siphoned from the Colorado river, via canal, to the Imperial Valley for irrigation.  Only a few years later the Colorado flooded, breached all the canal gates and began to fill in a section of the San Andreas fault, a few hundred feet below sea level.  The water submerged the town of Salton and the Southern Pacific railroad.  The flooding continued off and on for years and was the main reason why the Hoover Dam was constructed.  The lake has no outlet so it ebbs and flows with the weather.  As a result it has a salinity twice that of the ocean.

At the moment it's shrinking dramatically.  When we walked to the water's edge we were about 300 yards inside the former shore.  Thousands of fish carcasses littered the ground, no doubt having succumbed to the salinity.

At close to forty miles long you cannot see from one end to the other.  Unfortunately, these photos don't do the place justice.  It's an incredibly beautiful part of the planet.