RV for 5: Salton Sea and Slab City: Strangest Places Ever

Jill's Journal: My goodness. We’ve seen some unusual things in our nearly two years on the road, but the Salton Sea and Slab City take the cake. Hands down, they are the craziest, most bizarre places we’ve ever been.

There’s no hint of what is to come with a ton of date palm farms lining the drive from Palm Springs to the eastern shore of the Salton Sea.

And then, suddenly, there it is. You smell it before you see it. The Salton Sea is an accidental lake, created by man’s attempt to tame nature and a flood on the Colorado River in 1905. For 18 months, the entire Colorado River flowed into this basin. It is said it was pretty spectacular with an 80-foot waterfall due to dikes and failed floodgates. Before long, the city of Salton, miles and miles of Southern Pacific Railroad tracks, and 10,000 acres of Indian land were all covered. The lake sits directly on top of the San Andreas Fault and, at 227 feet below sea level, is the second-lowest place in North America behind Death Valley. It’s about 15 miles wide by 35 miles long, making it the largest lake in California, but it’s also really shallow at only 52 feet deep at its deepest point. It’s also 25% saltier than the ocean and growing more so every year. Did I mention it stinks? Bad. Really bad.

This eerie, stagnant lake (there’s no outlet) smells so terrible because dead fish are everywhere, baking in the unrelenting sun. They line the shores. In fact, that “sand” on the shore isn’t really sand at all, but a carpet of billions of barnacles and decomposing fish bones.

Those “rocks” all over the shore (with the exception of the large boulders in the very top of this photo) aren’t rocks at all. They’re rotting fish corpses. Standing on the shore, surrounded on all sides by dead fish that no one pays any attention to, is such an odd experience.

Lovely, isn’t it? Doesn’t it make you want to pack a suitcase and stay for a while? :)

Apparently it wasn’t always like this. In the 1950s, the lake was experiencing its heyday. Tourism was flourishing, the real estate market was hot, and folks like Sonny Bono learned to water ski here in the added buoyancy of the extreme salt water. It was in the 1970s that fish started dying and rotting algae blooms did nothing to help the growing vile stench. When the New River, which brings in a third of the lake’s inflow, was found to be the most polluted river in the world (thanks in no small part to sewage from almost a million residents in Mexicali), the Salton Sea’s fate may have been sealed.

This town on the shore looked like it had promise, so we stopped in. It’s mostly abandoned, with the residences (both the abandoned and inhabited ones) looking like this (below)…

Supposedly there’s still a few hundred people who call the area home.

The larger town of Niland is down the “coast” a bit and about two miles off shore. It boasts about 1,000 residents, although it has its share of abandoned buildings too.

The remote Niland is the gateway to Slab City, coined “the last free place in America,” the most infamous of all places in RV-dom.

If you didn’t know it was there, you probably wouldn’t continue for long down this desolate road.

But then, structures like this start appearing here and there.

Slab City was originally a World War II Marine artillery training base called Camp Dunlap. The base closed after the war and it was decommissioned. All that remained were concrete slabs, pylons, and 600 acres of dust and desert and bushes. It is now a squatters’ paradise. The land is completely free and anyone may live there. Hundreds (thousands?) of RVers come during the winter, while about 150 stay year-round. Of course, it’s hot. And it’s totally off the grid, way off the grid, meaning there’s no electricity. No water. No sewer (although we did see plenty of outhouses!). No other services (although judging from the satellite dishes, there’s plenty of television and internet).

Depending on how you look at it, Slab City is either a hardscrabble way to live in this modern world or complete liberation from society. We were both amazed and appalled. It seems part harmony, part degeneration. Whatever it is, it’s definitely eclectic. If you ever saw the 2007 movie “Into the Wild,” Slab City is the place where the main character lived with the bohemians for a time. It’s also featured in Shooter Jennings’ “Fourth of July” video. It is definitely a place to people watch and be fascinated at how another segment of society lives. More than anywhere else, the people here have got to be one of the closest things to American gypsies.

I don’t think pictures or words can adequately describe it. It is the weirdest, most surreal, most bizarre place we’ve been (and part of that is the atmosphere of the place).