It may not have followed a three hour tour on the S.S. Minnow but Bombay Beach was founded on October 8, 1929 by R.E. Gilligan along the shore of the Salton Sea, the largest inland lake in the southern California. Mary Ann approves.
Here’s some more fun facts:
- The vast body of water is roughly 35 miles long, 15 miles wide, 51 feet at its deepest, with over 110 miles of shoreline.
- The Salton Sea is one of the world’s largest inland seas and one of the lowest spots on Earth at 223 feet below sea level.
- Badwater Basin in Death Valley, which holds the record for the most feet below sea level in the United States, dips 59 feet lower than the Salton Sea.
- The name “Bombay Beach” was chosen to attract tourists and residents by evoking the glamorous image of the city of Bombay (now Mumbai) in India.
But wait, there’s more.
The California Department of Fish and Game actively introduced various fish species such as orangemouth corvina, sargo and gulf croaker from the Sea of Cortez into the Salton Sea in the 1950s.
The fish were sourced from San Felipe, Baja California, Mexico, aiding the Salton Sea’s reputation as a sport fishing capital.
The Los Angeles Mirror on January 8, 1960, claimed the Salton Sea was the headquarters for winter boating festivities, whose marine facilities were constantly being expanded.
“The Sea,” as it was referred to, offered sunshine and good water conditions during the fall and spring months. There were ample and excellent launching sites at the Sea, with more and more overnight accomodations being constructed.
Launching sites in the 1950s included Salton City, Desert Shores, Salton Sea Beach, North Shore Yacht Club, Desert Beach, Salton Sea State Park, Salton Beach and Bombay Beach. The state planned to invest $500,000 dollars for improvements into the state park before the end of the year.
The Sea offered visitors excellent speed boating, water skiing, and good fishing. Advertisers hawked the Sea as “The American Mediterranean” and the “Salton Riviera,” which drew throngs of eager vacationers and sportsmen. The area attracted half a million tourists annually, rivaling Yosemite National Park.
Coastline Dispatch, 01, Sep 1950 (San Juan Capistrano, CA)
In June of 1960, the Pasadena Independent reported 130 cars had been dumped in the Sea to expand the artificial reef approximately one mile off the east shore three and a half miles from Bombay Beach.
The Department of Fish and Wildlife added a line of junked cars in a 1,200 foot line in 35 feet of water. Similar reefs had also been placed off Coachella Wasteway on the east side of the Sea, and off Salton City on the west side of the Sea. Two hundred more cars were planned to be added.
Oscar Bashford of Bombay Beach explained to a reporter from the Los Angeles Mirror on Nov 03, 1960, that there had been a big improvement fishing the past weekend in the Salton Sea for corvina and sargo perch, a small silvery grunt (Anisotremus davidsonii) found in southern California and Mexico.
Orangemouth corvina, (family Sciaenidae) a type of white sea bass, were running at 3-5 pounds with sargo coming in up to one and a half pounds with lots of limits being taken.
The best spot for fishing was between Bombay Beach and Salt Creek at the spot of an artificial reef where old car bodies had been recently sunk by the State Department of Fish and Game, Bashford stated.
Bashford advised longjaw mudsuckers, a type of minnow, were still the best bait for corvina. In southern California mudsuckers are commonly found around California killifish, arrow goby, and topsmelt.
Adult mudsuckers of the Salton Sea ate mostly pile worms. Bashford added corvina up to 15 lbs. were hitting like gangbusters in a prior newspaper article he was interviewed for earlier in March 1960.
Los Angeles Mirror, 08 Jan 1960. Note the depiction of a sunken Spanish galleon that our friend, John Grasson, was investigating before his death. Was the Lost Ship of the Desert fact or fiction?
On November 16, 1960, the Pasadena Independent ran an article about an austere place south of the state park called Bombay Beach. The primitive area consisted of barren ground resembling a lunar landscape where nothing grew.
The article described a scattering of packing boxes hammered into homes, some permanent structures, a few trailers, canvas cots under the immense sky and a whole lot of junk.
The author emphasized Bombay Beach was rather frightening place to witness. No paved roads or sidewalks adorned the dirt road in this sterile area of the desert in 1960.
The story concluded by saying Bombay Beach was a stark contrast to Palm Springs, less than two hours away but it seemed to appeal to people looking for a cheap real estate deal.
Sixty five years later, things haven’t changed much.
Following a large storm and a sudden fish die-off, The Daily Breeze published a story on June 18, 1970 about the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s aerial survey which verified floating fish were found over an 80 square mile offshore area four miles wide and 20 miles long extending from Whitewater south almost to Bombay Beach.
Fortunately, shifting winds kept most of the bobbing fish offshore and only a small percentage ever reached the northeastern beaches. None drifted westward past the middle of the Sea and most of them eventually sank to the bottom.
Even so, state and county clean-up crews removed 80 tons of fish from 15 miles of public use beaches between Whitewater and Bombay Beach. The fish were buried at a remote site. It added up to a whole bunch of stank.
The Zig Zag House
The Salton Sea Test Base (SSTB), approximately 6 miles south of Salton City, was originally established by the Department of the Navy as the Salton Sea Naval Air facility in 1942. The Center for Land Use Interpretation said the Navy continued to use the Salton Sea Test Base through the 1970s, and over 1,100 missile and bomb tests were performed.
The site was flooded by the slowly rising Salton Sea, and was abandoned for years. Full-time occupation of the facility was terminated in September 1987 with the removal of Navy security forces. The facility was intermittently used in the early 1990s to support U.S. military training operations
The former SSTB consists of approximately 20,000 acres of mostly undeveloped desert and water in the vicinity of the southwest shore of the Salton Sea. The Navy owned approximately 5,900 acres of the former SSTB. Currently, the former SSTB property is owned and managed by the BLM for conservation of natural and cultural resources.
Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range (CMAGR), also established in World War II, straddles the northern portion of the Chocolate Mountains to the east of the Salton Sea and is still active. The Navy and Marines own CMAGR. It is closed to the public. Daily missile launches can be observed from Bombay Beach and other areas around the Salton Sea.
In 1976, the level of the Salton Sea began to rise after the floodwaters from Tropical Storm Kathleen swept through Imperial Valley and gradually increased over the next two decades, flooding shoreline communities all around the Sea.
Bombay Beach was particularly hit hard and found itself underwater. After the businesses and homes closest to the sea were flooded, a berm was built around Bombay Beach to protect the structures that the water hadn’t reached yet.
The structures on the other side of the berm at 5th and E were left to corrode and were reclaimed by the Sea.
Bombay Beach’s decline was accelerated by the construction of the levee that caused drainage problems during heavy rains.
The Salton Sea became polluted with fertilizer runoff from farms and increasingly salty, which destroyed the lake’s ecosystem.
At its worst, the salt content of the Salton Sea is approximately 44,000 parts per million (ppm), which is significantly higher than the ocean’s salinity of around 35,000 ppm, making it roughly 25% saltier than the ocean; this high concentration of salt is due to the lake having no outlet and water evaporating, leaving behind the salt content.
Within a mere decade between 2009 and 2019, an alarming 97% of the million fish once thriving in the Sea vanished.
Many residents around the Salton Sea, including those in Bombay Beach, were eventually driven out by the pungent odor of the dying fish, fear of acute respiratory illnesses such as asthsma and Valley Fever, abject poverty, and the ebb and flow of flooding and the draining of the Salton Sea.
Strong winds in the region still pick up the fine silt from the exposed lakebed.
We met Mark and Denise who were on their way to Yuma, Arizona from Portland, Oregon, via the Ski Inn.
The Salton Sea peaked in 1995, but with little rain, has since been evaporating faster than the Colorado River seeping downhill through farms can replenish it, as farmers conserved more water.
The Ventura County Star reported on September 1, 2021, that the 324-square mile Salton Sea had shrunk by 40 square miles since 2003, exposing more airborne toxins and dust.
Bombay Beach began to experience a revival in 2018 with an influx of artists and intellectuals attracted to the post-apocalyptic atmosphere of the tiny town.
The derelict “living ghost town” status of Bombay Beach has attracted many photographers, filmmakers, urban explorers, and tourists.
Bombay Beach is a grid of 32 square blocks with a handful of perhaps 200 residents.
In 2021, Atlas Obscura described Bombay Beach as, “Bodie Meets Burning Man.” Accurate.
The Desert Sun on July 18, 2019, reported Palm Springs Art Director Louis Grachos cited events such as Desert X, the grassroots Bombay Beach Biennale, Joshua Treenial and other art installation projects to foster site-specific artworks tied to the natural life cycles of the desert.
According to their website, “The Bombay Beach Biennale is a renegade celebration of art, music, and philosophy that takes place on the literal edge of western civilization – the shores of the Salton Sea.
It was founded in 2015 as a public arts event untethered from the commercial art world of galleries, museums, and art fairs, and as a tool to amplify the largely unknown and ignored ecological crisis that is the Salton Sea.”
If you’re looking for a gas station or grocery store though, keep going. And going. There aren’t any in Bombay Beach. Cell phone service is sketchy too, so be prepared.
Bombay Beach boasts a its only bar and restaurant in town called The Ski Inn at 9596 Avenue A, along with frugal retirees, a smattering of curiosity seekers and lately, a gaggle of artists.
Chef Anthony Bourdain ate at the Ski Inn in 2008 during his show, No Reservations.
Baltimore movie director John Waters of Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Pink Flamingos and many other cult movie classics has also stopped by the Ski Inn.
Other luminaries who visited Bombay Beach were Frank Sinatra, The Beach Boys, and Bing Crosby.
And of course, it wouldn’t be a proper desert article without mentioning one of our all time favorite racontuers, Huell Howser, who visited Bombay Beach’s finest for his PBS Show called Visiting with Huell Howser.
What does the future of the Salton Sea hold? It may be summed up in one word: lithium. The Salton Sea region has the fifth largest lithium deposit in the world. Electric car batteries require lithium.
Whether you’re happy or saddened by this discovery depends on what side of the environmental aisle you stand on.
One thing’s for certain though. Artists will keep creating art in Bombay Beach that tells their stories in poignant and imaginative ways.
Relatives out for summer vacation, looking to make their first visit to the Pacific Ocean? No gas money to make it to the coast? Not a problem.
Drive them to Bombay Beach at the Salton Sea. Point to the land mass across the water and say, “So, I betcha didn’t know Santa Catalina was this close to Malibu, did you?”
Hey Elon, look for us to provide more money-saving tips in future articles.
Bombay Beach is easily accessible off Highway 111. Art displays change but many of your favorites still remain.
There are many art installations we did not include in our article, we’ll leave those for you to find.
Nobody likes a spoiler.
Although there’s a few rough roads, you can easily drive a two-wheel drive vehicle around Bombay Beach. It is very likely you may not encounter anyone else.
It just adds to the Road Warrior vibe; embrace it.
They’re probably just enjoying a few adult libations and cheeseburgers at the Ski Inn.
When we visited Bombay Beach in March of 2025, it appeared many homes were under various stages of renovation and renewal.
Yet, thankfully all in their quirky ways.
Take your time, there is much to explore, contemplate and marvel over. You can’t get lost except in your own thoughts. Enjoy your coddiwomple.
Top photo, courtesy of John Earl, 2023. A plaque reads: “The daVinci Fish sculpture is a collaborative work of five artists. The sculpture is over 40 feet long with a 44-foot wingspan and is mounted 12 feet up on a vertical axle so it moves with the wind. The tail is articulated so it moves back and forth. It took about eight months to fabricate all of the parts. Much of the project was fabricated in Paonia and Crested Butte, Colorado.”
Resources
Bombay Beach Arts and Culture https://bbartsculture.org/new-page
