It’s difficult to appreciate how malodorous the Salton Sea is without actually visiting it. Formed in the early 1900s when the Colorado River was accidentally diverted into California’s Imperial Valley, the rampant architectural speculation of the ‘Salton Riviera’ – a ‘Palm Springs with water’ – soon faded with the toxic reality of 140-degree summers. Development of the Desert Shores resort community began in 1958. The community drew thousands of RV users and boats, and on weekends the community was a bustling resort. Fishing, boating and just plain old relaxing were the order of the day. Then in late 1976 and 1977 a pair of Mexican tropical storms ravaged the Imperial and Eastern San Diego County desert region with massive amounts of rain, and Salton Sea level rose, flooding out many of these shoreline resorts and communities. Twenty years after the boom began, it busted. Business relying on the tourist trade failed, the marinas went belly up. The docks and water area of the fingers are, today, fenced off, and extremely quiet. The old RV pads now house only thousands of birds, the days of busy weekends and warm winter days filled with RV’ers all but forgotten.