The Palm Desert "B" Tour

I'm down in the Coachilla Valley with friends, and we've spent the first couple of days exploring some not-so-typical destinations.

First, we made a half-day of visiting the Thousand Palms Oasis and hiking along the San Andreas Fault to a second palm-intense spot. The wind was very high that day, reaching 75MPH, and sometimes made the walking difficult and the resulting sandstorm a bit painful. After we finished up with the palms, we took a hike up a short incline and viewed the fault from a higher vantage point. Here you could see very clearly the line delineating the fracture; it was deset on one side of the fault, and green on the other.

The next day (yesterday) we decided on a road trip around the Salton Sea. It's unnerving when you drive through the pristine boulevards of Palm Desert and Indian Wells, then continuing through the working class neighborhoods of Indio. We were headed to Route 86 on the west side of the Salton Sea. Our first stop was courtesy of the California Highway Patrol, when he gave us a warning for doing 70MPH in a 55MPH zone. We used cruise from then on in. The next place we stopped was a little, unnamed town just north of Salton City. It had obviously been a great plan of somebodies to build a community of some size there - as the streets were all paved, and the power was in and all laid in a grid. Sorely, something happened on the way to prosperity; I imagine it was the real estate  crash of 2007-8. Homes are abandoned, unfinished or unstarted. The hundred or so homes that are finished and remain are all for sale at deep-dish-discounts. There are a few hardy soles still there, and somebody was bust fixing their roof as we drove by. We commented that it would be sad to have to live (by countless circumstance) here.

Next stop down was lunch in Brawley at the Cattle Call Park (lunch provided by the deli counter at Von's), next to the water treatment plant. Then back in the car to the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge. Here we hiked about two miles round trip to a place where we could take a close look at the sea itself (quite smelly due to the high bacteria count in the water), and to all of the birds that either call the area home, or just a rest-stop on their migration.

Much to the chagrin of some of our travelers, we next went to have a look at Slab City, near Niland, California. This is a really interesting place where one must learn to live off the grid - no water, sewage or electricity. A small community of $500,000 motorhomes and $0 makeshift caravans are there, in an abandoned US Army tank training facility (circa WWII). You feel a bit voyeuristic when driving through the place, although there are plenty of signs out asking passers-by to stop and buy whatever they're selling. 

On our way back now, as I had thought the whole tour would take about four hours and we had already been gone six, we stopped in at the Fountain Of Youth Spa And RV Park to have a look see. Nice if you're stopping overnight or for a couple of days, but really in the middle of nowhere (Highway 111 south of Mecca, CA). Last stop was at Leon's in Meca - a Mexican grocery store that must have been the busiest place in North America. Here we bought some pastries that were unidentifiable, and only found out this morning what they actually were.

I don't recommend spending the day with five people crammed into Nissan Altima circumnavigating the Salton Sea, but it was a good way to see stuff you'd normally never go out of your way to see.