California has a lot of wonderful riding roads, dramatic scenery, and places of great interest. This blog and related video describes one of the weirdest places in the state you can ride to, the Salton Sea and specifically Bombay Beach, Salvation Mountain, and Slab City, that collectively I can best describe as a post-apocalyptic hippy artist commune. The area is in the far southeast of the state about 60 miles southeast of Palm Springs, 130 miles east of San Diego, and 190 miles southeast of Los Angeles. The roads around the lake aren’t the most exciting but if you’re riding to the area from the west or northwest, the Peninsula Range of Mountains in east San Diego County and the Santa Rosa & San Jacinto Mountains in western Riverside County offer some great riding to and from the destination.
The Salton Sea has by far the largest surface area of any lake in California at about 343 square miles and was created by accident. In 1905 spring floods broke through a headgate in an irrigation canal from the Colorado River and for two years until the breach was stopped about 7.5 million acre-feet of water flowed into a depression in the desert creating the sea. Entrepreneurs soon took advantage of the new inland body of water and created a resort destination with hotels, marinas, and vacation homes. Over the following decades less water flowed into the sea than evaporated, concentrating minerals and agricultural chemicals and creating an unhealthy environment for fish and birds, and pungent dust clouds. Because of this the businesses and communities reliant upon lake visitors failed and the communities became ghost towns.
Since the 1980s, artists, bohemians, van-lifers, loners and eccentrics have lived an off-grid hard-scrabble existence creating thousands of art installations from the abandoned and derelict buildings, and the left-over detritus from the area’s heydays in the 1950s and ‘60s. Bombay Beach sits on the edge of the receding east shore of the lake and features a grid of variously abandoned and art adorned houses, and a sand beach with hundreds of art installations, including a full-sized pirate ship. You can ride onto the sand over a berm at the end of Avenue E but keep to the hardpacked sand unless you’ve got more aggressive dual-sport tires.
Salvation Mountain at the entrance of Slab City was created over several decades by artist Leonard Knight (1931–2014) who moved to the area in the mid-1980s and single-handedly built a sprawling half-acre devotional art installation including a 100-foot high “mountain,” adorned vehicles, and a boat. Designated “a folk-art site worthy of preservation and protection” by The Folk Art Society of America, a charity was formed in 2011 to maintain the site, with volunteers adding new coats of paint and shoring up the mountain.
Slab City is the remnants of a WWII U.S. Marine Corp base that was decommissioned in the mid-1950s and handed off the state. It’s now home to a multitude of residents who refer to themselves a “Slabbers.” They’ve parked their vans or built ramshackle homes on the concrete slabs left when the military base buildings were demolished and live an almost anarchist existence with virtually no law enforcement, running water, or electricity. For those familiar with the original Burning Man Festival, it’s like that but permanent, raw, and brutally real.
To reach the eastern shore of the Salton Sea, Bombay Beach, Salvation Mountain, and Slab City, if coming from the north take Highway 86 south from the 10 Freeway and split off on Highway 111 south. If riding from the west take the 8 Freeway east and head north on Highway 111. Together with the Salton Sea, other places of interest to ride to in the area are Glamis Dunes—California’s little Sahara Desert and mecca for off-road enthusiasts, Joshua Tree National Park, and the attractions of Palm Springs and adjacent communities.
Access these Google Maps links to the places mentioned: Bombay Beach, Salvation Mountain, Slab City, Glamis Dunes, Joshua Tree National Park, Palm Springs.
