What it is is this actually geographically called the Salt and Sink.
It's this depression in the lower, lower California right near the Mexican border.
It's right at sea level and water would collect there after like, you know, the seasonal rains.
And when the Colorado River was being diverted for all these irrigation projects in the early 20th century,
in 1905 there was this breach of this irrigation canal and the water flowed into the Salt and Sink.
And everything was fine for about 20 or 30 years and that's like when it had its resort era.
But the cumulative effect is the bigger sort of agribusiness started of fertilizers which also contain a lot of salt coming into the sea.
That's what really increased the salinity, made the water rise and started killing off the fish with the algae blooms,
killing off the birds with the bacteria and the stations and basically wrecked this whole sort of resort economy that had started up around there.
I mean it's really like, it's like hell. It's hot as hell and it smells really bad because all the dead fish,
there's like no matter where you go they're dead fish on the beach.
And it's just incredibly desolate. There's hardly anybody around. People who live there are kind of like out of this California version of deliverance or something.
And it's just kind of like sketchy, hot as hell and really inhospitable.
And it was a sort of paradise but now it's just totally fucked up.
I think trying to describe the smell is, it's something like all the worst smells you can imagine of rotting food and something kind of like a dead animal.
It's like you can tell it's sort of seeped into the land there and the water is giving off this incredibly sort of putrid saltiness.
It's like, I don't know, there's nothing fresh. Decay has like a fresh smell because there's something that was alive recently like plant decay but there it's like this sort of old dead smell and it's like compounded by the heat.
It's like a horrible future smell that's being baked and making it even worse.
