Since it was the Palm Springs Life article that got me to take my road trip to the Salton Sea, I've included some of it here as well as a link to the entire article for those of you who want to read on. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did

The opalescent light and serene, wine-dark water with its ever-changing shorelines are but a few hallmarks of the Salton Sea's beauty. Yet the abandoned resorts and wrecked developments at the edge of California's largest inland body of water are what often draw visitors, artists, and photographers.

Many of these visitors, however, overlook what lies below the surface of the myriad human endeavors that dot the sea's beach fronts. Clues around the shore are many, and explorers can easily tease out this distinct landmark's long and bewitching history.

The latest incarnation of the sea was born just after the turn of the last century. Many people dreamed of the transformative possibilities of irrigation with water from the Colorado River, and it became a story of too much - and too little - water. When Charles Robinson Rockwell planned to build canals to bring water to the Salton Sea area for agriculture before the turn of the 20th century, he got help from Canadian canal builder George Chaffey. Silt from the Colorado came along with the water and constantly had to be dredged out.

In February 1904, an exceptionally rainy period began, which caused the excess water to rampage down makeshift canals and pour unimpeded into the Salton sink for the next two years. People generally think of the Salton Sea as a human mistake. Certainly human engineering participated in the flooding of the land; however, this had already happened many times in the centuries preceding, so a naturally occurring event just happened to coincide with the human attempt to use the water for economic development. With no human intervention, chances are that the Colorado River would have created the lake anyway. The flood was finally stemmed and then dammed in February 1907 by Southern Pacific Railroad President Edward H. Harriman...

The present Salton Sea is only the most recent of several historic lakes that periodically filled the Salton sink, or basin. The most noted was Lake Cahuilla. It was a great deal larger and dominated the Salton trough during the last part of the Pleistocene epoch nearly 40,000 years ago.

While the present Salton Sea measures 34 miles long, 16 miles wide, and 226 feet below sea level, Lake Cahuilla at its high point was 110 miles long, 31 miles wide, and about 39 feet above sea level. The actual shoreline of Lake Cahuilla varied as the water fell and was replenished seasonally by the Colorado.