Days of rain covered Coachella Valley in mud, but the clouds broke in time for a Christmas morning hike at the La Quinta Cove trailhead. Out in the misty distance is the Salton Sea.
Category: Coachella Valley
Salton Skies
Bombay Beach‘s beach keeps expanding as the Salton Sea dries back to where it was at the start of the twentieth century, making for an enormous span to match the enormous arc of sky above.
The New Bombay Beach
Like a full-time Burning Man, Bombay Beach shifted from its origins as a sort of “California Riviera” in the 1950s to something with more the feel of an artists’ colony. The town’s little grid of streets amid the emptiness of the desert valley brings to mind open-world video game maps, but the eclectic nature of the beach itself makes reality (as usual) far more interesting.
Swingset Dislocation
Some kind of teleportation accident seems as likely an explanation as any other for how a swing set wound up in the middle of a lake.
Swingset in Its Cove
The human-made swing set structure is alone against the huge scale of the Salton Sea, mountains, and sunset beyond. (Excepting, of course, that the Salton Sea is itself effectively human-made.)
Visiting the Swing Set
One of my best images (and I do mean best) captures a swing set adrift in the Salton Sea, seemingly separated from time and space. While my first worry was that an aerial view of the swing and its setting might remove some of the magic, I’ve realized that the opposite is true. The merging of sea and sky into a single cloud-graced expanse make even the mundane array of vehicles on the shore look parked at the edge of forever.
Hypercube Shadow Symmetry
This shadow-of-a-hypercube sculpture is pretty enormous, but the sense of space and structure changes when view from a drone floating above.
Riding/Driving/Flying Off Into the Sunset
This car/plane sculpture at Bombay Beach looks either very ready or very unready to head off into the sunset—but I can’t figure out which.
On the Way to Find America
Does any combination more satirically capture the American experience than an SUV and an Airstream trailer traversing the empty wasteland resulting from an ecological disaster?
Reflection Makes a Diamond
Drone photography geometry exercise: a tetrahedron in profile collapses into a triangle, then reflection doubles it into a diamond.
Tetrahedron in the Mud
AI-generated images have perhaps made us so inured to impossible images as to dilute the shocking impact of the truly surreal. Bombay Beach’s sculptures, planted in the shores of the Salton Sea, “floating” in the sky, truly look like nothing else I’ve ever seen.
Empire Polo Club Panorama
A big panorama of Empire Polo Club helps one to understand a bit how this site can hold both Coachella and Stagecoach.
Sun Drops Behind the Mountains
Winter days in the desert are short enough already, but the tall San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains cut the light off even sooner. High up with a drone, there are still some final rays to be harvested.
Water Hazard
For something termed a “hazard,” this body of water looks pretty placid in the evening light.
Best Wishes for a Fast Recovery, Coachella Valley
“Coachella Valley was just battered by Hurricane Hilary.” — What an odd sentence to write. Today, we’re looking back to times when the idea of this dry lake bed being hit by a hurricane sounded like science fiction.
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