Drive southbound from Joshua Tree on the 111 and find, to your right, the Salton Sea, the behemoth salt lake. Hydrogen sulfide gas clouds the far rim, vanishing point obliviated. To your left, the Chocolate Mountains appear like a shadow above the desert’s boundless microwave. Gold mines with names like American Girl and Picacho once attracted hotshot prospectors; today, the Chemgold corporation owns the latter, and the former is defunct. Now, these ranges host Marines from Yuma who come to practice their aim. Driving the 35-mile lakefront on the hottest day in August, the daytime temperature registers 118℉. In the pitch of night, respite is 100℉. With the air conditioning turned up, the interior of my windshield burns my hand. On this single-lane highway, there are no floodlights and few exits; on the left bank’s similar Highway 86, neon bright gas stations serve as de facto beacons.
You’d be forgiven for not believing that you are on your way to some of the most productive farmland in the world. Almost all the produce Americans eat in the winter — and much of the alfalfa and Bermuda grass that is baled and fed to cows across the country — grow on Imperial County’s’s 425,000 irrigable acres, where water is available on demand. On this drive, maybe it would also surprise you to know that you’d likely just passed enough untapped lithium to provide the requisite battery materials for every single person in the United States to own an electric vehicle.
Though the Imperial Valley is one of the biggest producers in the American food supply chain and is poised to alter the global trade of lithium, it also has some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. And it’s likely many Americans have never heard of it. “I would say absolutely that this area is unknown. Whenever I try to explain where it’s at, I say, well, it’s kind of by San Diego, kind of by Palm Springs, kind of by Yuma,” says Tyler Brinkerhoff, Imperial Valley historian. “And people are like, so Salvation Mountain? Well, you’re getting close.”
One Hundred Years of Farming the Desert
This perennially warm section of the Yuha and Colorado Deserts — and its position below sea level and downstream of the Colorado River — lent itself to becoming a suitable American winter breadbasket in the early 1900s. That’s when the Imperial Land Company encouraged global settlers to immigrate to the valley and stake a claim on the richly productive land. Before capital development, the river would flood and dry unpredictably, challenging the new farming community.
But in 1928, the Boulder Canyon Project Act both built the Hoover Dam and the All-American Canal, an 82-mile-long aqueduct that stretches from the Colorado River, which delineates Arizona and California, all the way to Imperial County. The resultant engineering allows a farmer today to order water in the afternoon and have it flow to their fields via the irrigation ditches that line the square plots of field the next day.
It becomes clear that Imperial County is a sandbox of extremes, a place where land use can quickly turn into a lose-lose game. In 1905, torrential rainfall caused the irrigation canals that branched from the Colorado River to flood. Two hundred feet below sea level, the Salton Sea was the resultant farming accident. By the 1990s, polluting runoff turned the vacation spot into one of the grandest ecological disasters in the country.