Visiting Bombay Beach, mulling the Salton Sea's future

First, the background.

I've read Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" (second and sadly last edition due to his untimely death) 10 or more times, with a heavily highlighted, underlined, and marginal-noted version in my hands.

Growing up in Gallup, New Mexico, my family may have, or may not have, stopped briefly at the north end of the Salton Sea on a return home from a SoCal vacation. We took I-10 on the way back and ate lunch at Palm Springs, that I remember. 

Anyway, I know well the history of the sea's formation, the geological background of the multiple Lake Cahuilla births and deaths and more. And, I knew the basics of Bombay Beach.

As an adult, I may or may not have tried to hit the west shore of the sea on a springtime visit to Anza-Borrego State Park when leaving it via east side. I know I did three years ago, on my second-last wintertime visit. Unfortunately, driving around an unfamiliar town (think it was Salton Shores) in the dark, I couldn't figure out how to get to the shore itself. In daylight, this trip, I realized much of what I was bumping up against was berms with Imperial Irrigation District no trespassing signs.

The birding part of the world is not dead there, as the avocets show.

That said, that's on the slightly higher elevated west side, which also has less agrichemical runoff as there's less agriculture there than north, south and east.

I did see the "peeps," sandpipers, on the east side, north of Bombay Beach itself. But no avocets, no grebes, etc.

South of Bombay Beach, the Sonny Bono/Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge may have sandhill cranes, along with other birds:

But it is artificially sustained with man-made islands as the sea shrinks, water diversions, and artificial plantings of various cereal grains. Dirty secret: a lot of NWRs are unnatural in this way, like Bosque del Apache south of Albuquerque and Hagerman near me in North Texas. And, as climate continues to change, this is becoming more and more unsustainable at more and more Western NWRs.

Anyway, before Bombay Beach, in what eventually evolved encompassing, albeit hit-and-miss, almost three-quarters of the sea on this vacation, I stopped at the northeast corner. And, got great sunrise alpenglow:

As I noted, that beach looks like the salt knobs at Badwater in Death Valley. But, it's not, as footprints sinking nearly three inches deep into semi-quicksand beach show.

I was walking to see this color-beautiful puddle:

But, as I note in the caption, who knows what agrichemical runoff is mixed with salt to produce that color?

I do know that you smell it.

Salton Sea doesn't smell like the ocean. It does have the salt smell, but it also smells of those agrichemicals. To put it another way, the smell is vaguely like the "produced water" that's becoming an ever-bigger part of the modern oil business, with the additional smell here and there of dead fish, to the degree the Salton still supports any.

Some nutters may still talk of swimming in the Salton Sea. Would you jump in this schlag?

Not me.

The talk of, if not restoring, at least arresting the decline, of the Salton Sea has been going on 15 years or more.

Not happening. Let's be blunt. 

Not happening.

First, having more direct experience with the Army Corps of Engineers and Texas A&M-Galveston and their proposal for an "Ike Dike," as well as remembering the basics of the proposed initial cost vs finality of the Venentian lagoon gates, I know that cost estimates for such massive environmental engineering projects are always massively understated, and often the work involved is lied about. (That's true here in Tex-ass, where Ike Dike proponents lyingly compare it to work done in New Orleans and to its south around the mouth of the Mississippi and the Louisiana coast.)

Usually, all "stakeholders" in such plans have vested interests in lying about the costs. And, yes, they usually know better at the start, so they're lying. 

ANY time the Corps of Engineers bigfoots into something, it's gonna lie.

With the Salton Sea, the state of California has a vested interest in lying so it can pretend it's really interested in doing something and can pretend that its bits of around the edges nibbling work really are doing something.

Largely upper-crust White environmental groups have a vested interest in lying about the cost of fixing the Salton Sea, as it lets them show their concern for the poor Hispanics who can't leave places like Bombay Beach and Brawley, along with the various bands of Cahuilla Indian nations who surround the sea and won't leave.

In addition, has anybody asked the portion of these neoliberal-type environmentalists who live in Palm Springs, or LA itself, if they're willing to SERIOUSLY change their way of water life (or move) to help get serious about rounding up enough water to stave off the Salton's ongoing decline?

The reality, contra this sign:

Is that the sea is indeed sinking and that won't be reversed. It may be moderately slowed, but no more.

So, do we pay people to leave Bombay Beach if they want to? A lot of the neo-hipsters at not just it, but other places for which it's a stand-in, like Slab City, don't want to leave. 

They just want a fix that fixes them.

Fuck em. No matter your artsy-fartsyness at Bombay Beach (which it was fun photographing and photo-editing in detail):

That's the best thing we can say to them. Go back to Quartzsite if you're a snowbirder. Get back to where you once belonged, per the Beatles or try it elsewhere, if you're trying to semi-permanently live in the area. Or accept the consequences.

Otherwise, as a city? In my opinion, the present of Bombay Beach:

Is as good as it gets.

Nature bats last.

Vacation! With start-up glitches! (and updates)

I'm off on my first real vacation in more than three years. Because spammers, years ago, led me to put even this small blog, in terms of readership on moderation for comments, and because I'll probably be "unplugged" a fair amount of the time, my apologies if you don't see a comment go up right away.

Unfortunately, it's gotten off to a fucked-up start. Southworst had to scrub a plane and find another for my flight out of Houston. That, in turn meant I missed my rental car pickup, and Dollar shuts in Albuquerque at 11:30 p.m. Yeah, they'll hold it, I've been told, and I can get it ASAP Saturday, but, that doesn't feed the bulldog who already wanted to be on the road.

I guess on the car, I should have noticed, via Priceline, that Dollar closed relatively early. That said, none of the rental companies here are open after 1 a.m., and by the time I got my checked bags and got shuttled out there, I would have, at a minimum, been cutting it very close for comfort.

Update, Aug. 9: Things are better as of Sunday afternoon. I'm at a local coffee house in Durango, after hiking Chaco Canyon during the day on Saturday, then speding time with my brother in Farmington on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. I'll do some putz-around hiking at Canyon of the Ancients on my way out to Canyonlands, then head back over into Colorado.

Update, Aug. 12: Canyonlands was nice, though I deplore removing trail mileage figures from the latest trifolds, and worse, apparently putting at least one new cellphone tower in or near the Needles, and removing the old big-ass sign that warned that cellphones basically didn't work inside the park.

I did get some great (I think) astrophotography pix at both there and arches.

Right now, I'm in Boulder, Colorado, recharging camera battery as well as being online. The pix, at 3200 or 6400 ISO, at 15-30 secs, suck up a lot of juice.

But, I'll shoot some tonight, too, at Rocky Mtn. National Park, as part of the first night of Perseid meteor showers!

I'll have pix and thoughts from the Desert Southwest when I get back. I hope.

Three numbers for 2016: 67, 3, $10

Those are three numbers that are key for my presidential vote.

First, I don't want any neolib Democrat, let along a Republican, raising the age of full Social Security eligibility any higher. And, of course, I don't want any privatization talk. Instead, try making all income subject to FICA taxes. And, we can use that to better means-test Medicare. (Which could be a backdoor way to do single-payer national health care as "Medicare for all," but that's another story.)

Second, if not like Europe, we need to at least be like Canada, and guarantee employees above certain age and experience three weeks of paid vacation a year. Given the tumult of the US economy, this shouldn't be chained to specific jobs. The sad part is that this isn't even on the radar screen of many Americans, whether their work collars are blue, white or gray. And it should be.

I'm sure wingnuts would say "We can't afford this." Well, it's more affordable than people burning out on jobs, eventually to take early Social Security, and maybe even, especially if their collars are blue, to find the need to file for SSDI.

Third, we need to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour. That's in line with what it was at its peak in the 1950s 1960s. It's never been more than $11 an hour, even in Eisenhower Johnson-era prosperity, when far fewer married women, especially with kids, were working. So, and I've blogged about it before, while $15/hour might (even then, I'm not sure) be OK as a local minimum wage in pricey places like Seattle, it's way too high as a national standard. You'll kill red-state and blue-state rural areas alike.

But, $10 is needed. Then, let's make a COLA for the minimum wage part of the bargain, like Social Security, so the minimum wage doesn't start lagging again. We get both liberals and conservatives of various degrees and stripes to do this and take it off the table afterward.

And, I'm not alone in this!

Arindrajit Dube, an economics prof, says the same thing. Move to $10 an hour, then implement a COLA and take this out of the realm of politics. He discusses the issue in detail here.

Book take that summer vacation now

The Federal Aviation Administration’s crackdown on American Airlines could spread elsewhere. With less than two months to summer, ever-rising oil prices, airlines cutting planes out of the rotation to try to save fuel (when they’re not having to do catch-up inspections on them), the Senate wanting to conduct its version of the House Transportation Committee’s grilling of FAA officials, and the outside possibility of a strike at American, and summer air travel is likely to be a royal clusterfuck.

Beyond that, airlines that either own their own commuter companies, such as American Eagle being owned by American parent AMR, or have contracts with independent puddle-jumpers, are going to be slashing their routes.

In other words, if you want to travel from Dallas to L.A., or Chicago to Seattle, as long as American hasn’t grounded planes, you may still be OK. BUT… if you want to travel from Amarillo to L.A. via Dallas, American Eagle may not get you there so easily or frequently. And even Southwest, as the rest of its fuel hedge contracts expire, will probably fly routes like that less often.