Perhaps our favorite stop in Southern California, after doing some hiking and camping at Joshua Tree National Park, was the Salton Sea, a 35 mile long body of water just to the south of Joshua Tree NP. The Salton Sea is a shallow sea about 200 feet below sea level, and because it has no outlet it is saltier than the ocean, and growing more salty all the time. The sea has come and gone several times over the last 1000 years, and in its current state it is host to many species of migrating birds. You can see the snow geese swirling in the air - they were a lovely sight. In addition to snow geese we saw black throated stilts, brown and white pelicans, gamble's quails, roadrunners, logger headed shrikes and many little diving ducks that we couldn't identify. But the sea is a fragile environment and its growing saltiness means that it may not sustain fish life for much longer. As it is, only the tilapia can reproduce in such salty water. Without fish the birds won't have food and will lose this stopover on the Pacific flyway. So the local government is putting tons of money into trying to preserve the lake. It seems like trying to fight nature, but we wish them the best.

Close to the lake we visited the mud pots you see in the last photos. This part of California is only a few miles from two major faults, so there is lots of geothermal activity. These mud pots are created by hot gasses escaping and oozing mud up to the suface. Some form little volcanos and others are more like the pots you see in Yellowstone. It was odd to run across this phenomenum in an abandoned field surrounded by geothermal energy plants, basically in the middle of nowhere. We were tipped off at the visitor center at Salton Sea that they existed.

We have been impressed with the variety of climates and natural features of California - from the redwood forests of the north coast to the deserts and mountains of the south. To add to the odd mix, agricultural fields, irrigated by the Colorado River, butt right up against the desert, creating a juxtaposition that most of us from the midwest would find jarring. We associate good crops with rain, but here, where it doesn't rain much at all, only irrigation makes the fields productive.