the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

nd it is. The Salton Sea wouldn't be here if it weren't for human beings' tendency to meddle with nature. The Sea was created by accident, and continues to exist because we have robbed one the West's greatest rivers of its water, the Colorado. The Salton Sea is a living example of the consequences of large-scale water development, for it embodies many of the problems that we now face, after decades of damming our rivers and spreading our water thinly across the continents. The Salton Sea seems to remind us of our mistakes: we cannot continue to alter the natural world to our purposes without suffering dire consequences in the future. Nearing the shore of the vast desert lake I drive along blanched and broken asphalt, passing a few abandoned motor homes, their faded facad es peppered with shotgun fire. They stand like wounded sentinels, victims of target practice from errant hunte rs , mementos of a golden age that has long since faded and died. Across the valley the Chocolate Mountains reflect off the water, and the whole scene shimmers in the morning heat, which soars above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. I park in front of a vacant motel with shattered windows, alongside a row of dead palm trees, their stumps dried-up and sad looking. I exit the car and the heat accosts me. A short walk takes me to the beach. The bone-white sand crunches strangely under my feet. As I approach the water the air thickens with a rancid stench reminiscent of swamp gas. Dried to petrifaction, thousands of dead fish, their mouths agape and cartoon- like, lie at the water's edge. They line the shore like soap rings around stagnant bathwater, stretching off as far as I can see in either direction. The scene is a strange one. I feel as though I am witness to a disaster of epic proportions, some form of ecological holocaust. But to know the history of this forgotten body of water is to ponder one of the most puzzling environmental paradoxes known to man. At the heart of the matter lies one of the most vicious and si lent battles in the history of Western expansion, a battle driven by people's greed and a desire to conquer nature, a battle fought over the desert's most precious resource: water. A little history. One hundred years ago, the Salton Sea did not exist. Instead, a vast, dry lakebed, encrusted with salt and minerals, known as the Salton Sink was the lowest elevation in the United States at almost 300 feet below sea level. Less than fifty miles away flowed an unrestrained body of moving water so immense and treacherous that scores of early explorers had perished trying to cross it-the Colorado River. The river was named "colorado," or colored, because of the mountainous quantities of silt it carried to the Pacific Ocean. According to lore of the Cahuilla Indian tribe, which has occupied the basin for eons, the nearby Salton Sink was known to fill on occasion when the Colorado River would spill its banks. The Cahuillas remember a time long ago when the valley was filled with water and the sea teemed with fish . The legend describes how over time the lake slowly dried up in the desert heat. For hundreds of years, the Salton Sink had remained dry. Until, of course, European settlers came. In the last part of the 19th century, a number of industrious men sought to tap the Colorado and turn the nearby deserts into farmland. They constructed numerous levees and canals, and the nation watched in awe as the desert wasteland transformed into a miracle of agriculture, the Imperial Valley. But the Colorado was not so easily tamed. Canals quickly filled with tons of si lt that rendered them useless. During the wet season, the river would often flood the towns that had sprung up on its banks and wash away levees as though they were castles of sand. By 1904, the initial system of canals to the valley was completely defunct and the California Development Company, which owned the rights to the water and controlled its canal system, was nearly bankrupt, but it was still under contract to deliver water to the ever-thirsty Imperial Valley. Under pressure, the company hastily dug a new channel to divert a portion of the river's flow. The Colorado waters were in flood and already dangerously high, but it had little choice. What the company didn't know was that the river had only just begun to rise. Fuelled by EI Nino-like rains in the upper Colorado basin, the mighty river was set to flood like they had never seen before. And flood it did. The entire contents of the river jumped its banks and flowed down the freshly dug channel, heading northward towards the Salton Sink. Within weeks, a sea formed in the desert, and man, naturally, rejoiced. For two years, the river thwarted all attempts at containment, and flowed unchallenged into the Sink. Representing one of the West's biggest rivers at flood stage, the volume of water that flowed into this dry desert valley was literally astounding. Finally, in early 1907, the federal government stepped in and stopped the flooding. Using huge equipment and backed by federal money, the 36

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