Trip to Salton Sea

Sept 4, 2004

The Salton sea is about 150 miles from Los Angeles and is large enough so that you can see a horizon meeting the sky. Its a highly saline lake and its salinity is greater than that of sea water. Lots of different varieties of birds visit the lake annually. A movie was also made named on this location. If you want to do star gazing, this is probably one of the best places as it is probably the most desolate place you will find close to Los Angeles. If you camp on Bombay beach on the eastern coast of the lake, the closest signs of any civilization would be about 50 miles in any direction. On a moonless night, it can be absolutely pitch dark.

I had already been to slaton see about two years ago and found it a fantastic place to watch the night sky and wanted to show Aparna the same. Its a two and half hour drive from Los Angeles, but mind you, if you want to camp here overnight, there will no food services for 50 or more miles in any direction - so better carry you food supplies with you.

We started in the afternoon aiming to reach there much before sunset, as pitching a tent in that darkness would be quite an impossible task. We reached just a few minutes before sunset and had to hurry up pitching our tent.

We were the only ones in the entire area. The knowledge that you are probably the only two people for about 50 miles in any direction is quite thrilling!

We selected a nice open place with a great view in front of the beach to pitch our tent and started by clearing the place of all the stones and fallen branches. By managed to pitch our tent just in time.

It can quite hot and humid near Salton sea at this time of the year but towards the night things cool down with a nice breeze blowing. Even though we pitched the tent, we actually never used it, since sleeping out under the night sky and the breeze was much better than being inside the tent.

Sunsets over Salton Sea are quite amazing. The entire lake turns orange red due to the setting sun. We spent a long time sitting by the lake and the had our dinner in the car light.

The night was moonless and cloudless - a perfect night to watch the night sky. We saw the milky way here as clearly has I had never seen before. We identified a few constellations. We say several shooting stars over the night. One of them was extremely bright and shot right across the entire sky! We even saw a few man made satellites. It is the most amazing night sky watching experience we ever had.

The sky during sunrise was equally fabulous and looked like straight out of a painting, only real. A lot of fish die here and swept off to the shore due to the extremely salinity of the water. Several birds are attracted by this prospect of abundant food for breakfast.

There were thousands of birds here in the morning. I am sure would be a bird watcher's paradise. We spent a long time watching these birds and hearing their cries. It was bliss.

From Salton sea we drove to Calexico - as the name suggests this is a town at the border of Mexico and California. Other side of the border is Mexicali. We were quite fascianted by the names and that is primarily what led us to drive here. We walked to about 300 feet of the border and were a border security gaurd thought that we were crossing over into US from the Mexico and stopped us. He let us go after seeing the driver's license.

After having lunch at Calexico we drove back to LA after a great weekend.