Bombay Beach

This post is one of a series about our trip to Arizona and California spanning the 2018/2019 New Year’s holiday. For an overview of our trip and links to other posts, please see 2018/2019 Western Trip.

Bombay Beach is an unincorporated town, located about midway along the eastern shore of the Salton Sea in California. It was a popular resort area in the 1950s (see our post Salton Sea & North Shore); now it is of interest mostly to photographers and visitors who want to view the abandoned buildings, offbeat art, and ruins by the water. It is the lowest community in the United States, located 223 feet below sea level. The few residents remaining frequently get around in golf carts since the closest gas station is 20 miles away in Niland.

Before our trip we had seen pictures of pilings in the water, the remains of seaside buildings or docks. Those pictures were taken when water levels were higher, because the salt and sand encrusted pilings we saw were in the sand, hundreds of feet from the shoreline. However, they were still very interesting, as was the eclectic array of art ensembles in the dry sands of the beach.

We were impressed with the imagination of the artists who created these groupings of scrap and mundane objects. Our most memorable artifacts included a painted “art” boat, an art-structure “ship” created from pieces of scrap wood called El Barco de la Muerte (The Ship of Death), and an ironing board with an iron mounted on some scrap wood. In addition, there is a rusted construction crane from the 1950s on the sands of the beach.

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Roadtrippers – Bombay Beach

The American Southwest – Photo of crane in water

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