How One Man In A Canoe Found Beauty In The Troubled Salton Sea

Photo: Sicco Rood’s canoe on the shore of the Salton Sea. (Courtesy Sicco Rood)

Sicco Rood didn’t know what to expect when he set out, in the last days of December, to paddle his canoe around the Salton Sea. The 300-square-mile lake in the Coachella Valley is California’s largest inland water body and one of its most forbidding, at least for a long-distance adventure with just a paddle.

Temperatures around the lake can approach freezing in the winter and rise well above 100 degrees in the summer. There’s no fresh water. And much of the lake is bordered by marsh, mudflats and quicksand.

While preparing for the trip, Rood, a 50-year-old photographer and research associate at UC Irvine’s Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center in eastern San Diego County, hadn’t come across any accounts of anyone ever having canoed around the lake before.

“Am I going to scrape along old bombs or get stuck in the weeds?” he recalled wondering. (The Navy’s former Salton Sea Test Base practiced bombing during World War II in and around the lake.) “Or get blown into the middle of the sea by the winds?”

None of those things happened, although conditions weren’t perfect enough for Rood to make it all the way around the inland sea, an estimated 87-95 miles by his planned route. A storm and a family commitment sent him home after six days of paddling with about one-third of the trip left to complete, which he hopes to do sometime this year.

Rood shared with LAist some of his photos from the trip, and his discoveries.

The lake’s accidental creation

The modern version of the Salton Sea was accidentally created in 1905 when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal and began flowing into the dry bed of historic Lake Cahuilla. (Prior to that, the lakebed naturally filled up and dried out periodically.)

The Salton Sea’s trajectory since then has been turbulent — from a water sports and fishing mecca to a major ecological dilemma, seemingly ever on the brink of […]

Full article: laist.com