I explored the Salton Sea's abandoned "glamour capital"

But before its fabled toxicity took hold, the Salton Sea was once a popular resort destination. It’s an unlikely icon, one that’s been featured in hundreds of films over the decades. Growing up in the confines of the suburban, sun-scorched Coachella Valley, I was always drawn to its dying waters. 

In 2009, when I finally got to join my father on one of his photography trips to the area, one eerie landmark beckoned to us from a distance: an eviscerated, ghostly clubhouse near the shore. We captured its alluring decay with plastic Polaroid cameras, my eye drawn specifically to its rotting, graffitied interior. We continued through the empty building, navigating a maelstrom of trash, debris and caution tape, careful to avoid loose boards and nails. Apocryphal messages were scribbled on the walls and spray-painted inside dark closets. I distinctly remember walking past “Dead birds everywhere” and taking a photo of the dripping, blackened words “You’ll be the last one untied!!!”  

Outside, we found a drained, vandalized swimming pool overlooking the gray-blue horizon. Around the corner, I climbed through a lonely playground and peered into the brackish water gently lapping at the shore. Here, everything was still — but it didn’t used to be. 

Now, about 13 years later, I realize that my father and I had wandered through the skeletal remains of the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club, an atomic-era resort and “glamour capital” supposedly visited by the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis during the Salton Sea’s short-lived glory days. 

Introduced in 1960 by celebrated Swiss architect Albert Frey, the surreal $2 million marina was flanked by an airstrip and catamaran that was endearingly called the “Aloha.” But the yacht club was just one facet of a so-called “uncut gem,” according to Alex Cardenas, director at the Imperial Irrigation District. The Salton Sea itself was once a bustling tourist attraction: Visitors would race on ski boats at the "winter haven resort,” as Cardenas described it, living out a simulated oceanfront fantasy. The murky lake once felt like a boardwalk, he continued — though it’s unclear when and where this lore originated or how many resorts there were exactly.  

Grainy archival footage shows that the luxurious North Shore Yacht Club was indeed once thriving and full of promise. In a promotional video from the documentary “Past Pleasures at the Salton Sea,” which features old footage that appears to date back to the 1960s, a disembodied voice describes the club as a “recreational oasis” with ornate cocktail lounges and tea rooms, dance halls and dining areas. One vacant, dilapidated space with a surfboard-shaped light fixture that my dad and I had walked through turned out to be the former Commodore Room: a lounge where elderly couples once danced, drank and mingled against a stuffy beige backdrop.  

The same promotional film showcases naive tourists swimming in a pool overlooking the Salton Sea. Just beyond them, sailboats drift on sickly sea waters, their captains blissfully unaware of the ticking time bomb just beneath them. Little did they know that the same corvina and mullets they were harvesting from the lake would likely become tainted with selenium or that 150,000 eared grebes would suddenly show up dead on the shoreline. Despite warnings as far back as 1961 from government officials that the salinity would kill the sea in just a matter of years, the rich carried on, basking in their strange, artificial retreat.  

Inevitably, the Salton Sea’s nightmare ecosystem reared its head, slowly destroying this unusual paradise and driving out its wealthy clientele. “100-year” storms, rising salinity levels and relentless floods forced the yacht club to shutter in 1984, according to archives from the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

The vacant marina was turned into the Salton Sea Museum in 2010, but even that dream didn’t last. The history museum’s North Shore location closed down in 2011 due to disputes over its nonprofit status, the Desert Sun reported, and the founder, Jennie Kelly, died of cancer a few years later. Since her passing, it’s a mystery where her boxes of archival photos, postcards and newspapers went, putting the Salton Sea’s story at risk of disappearing. 

Representatives of the Desert Recreation District — an organization that manages and maintains parks and recreation facilities in the Greater Coachella Valley — told me that the North Shore Yacht Club has since been turned into a community center with “views to die for.”  

Since I left Southern California over a decade ago, most of the sea’s original structures have vanished, and so has the joyous atmosphere. The region is now more ecological dystopia than waterside playground. 

As an adult, I’m disturbed that this offbeat landmark of my youth has become the center of statewide political and ecological debate. The Salton Sea is drastically receding and exposing its toxic lake bed, or “playa,” putting the health of hundreds of thousands of nearby residents at risk, according to 2019 reports from Audubon California. It’s predicted that by 2028, an estimated 48,300 acres of exposed lake bed will spew arsenic-laced dust, tainting the air that 650,000 nearby residents breathe. 

The stakes are so high, the Salton Sea Authority warned that if the terminal lake completely dries up, it “will cause an air quality disaster of such enormous proportions that the valleys of Coachella and Imperial as well as southerly into Mexico may become uninhabitable.” In response, the state of California has pledged to invest millions in restoration efforts, the Department of the Interior recently announced.  

Regardless of what the Salton Sea becomes, in my mind, it will always be an ecological chimera: a complex, almost mythic symbol of American ambition. The unruly saline lake, for all its environmental problems, still gave me some of my fondest childhood memories with my father and instilled in me a philosophy that I continue to abide by: Not all that glimmers is glamorous, but it’s beautiful just the same.