United States
Salton Sea • Anza-Borrego Desert
Spring/Winter 2023 • California's Mad Maxish southeastern desert is home to retirees, artists, renegades, migrants, outcasts, RVers, ATVers, zealots, misanthropes, and speculators. Boom and bust has always been the norm for Salton Sea, which verges now on another wild swing: extraction of half a trillion dollars' worth of lithium from its toxic, inhospitable soil. To visit here, to breathe the air and wade in the water, is to shave weeks off your life. Nearby Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is more life-affirming, but its shadeless sprawl feels like a blast furnace in the summer. The park more than makes up for it in the spring when (winter rains permitting) long-dormant wildflowers blanket the hills and valleys in purple, yellow, white, and green.
