Salton Sea

Today we decided to go south on CA 111 to the Salton Sea. On the way we stopped at the Oasis Date Gardens just south of Thermal, CA. Dates have been grown here in the Coachella Valley since the early part of the century. The date palm trees grow about a foot per year and produce around 250-350 lbs. of dates annually. They start production about year seven and are used for production until approximately 50 years old. At that time they are sold to landscapers due to the fact that they have become so tall that they are dangerous for the workers. The trees have to be hand pollinated and harvested by hand. They do all the trimming and tree maintenance from atop the tree also. The date trees are grown from suckers that are cut from the base of the tree in its first ten years. They can't be grown from seed as the new tree will not produce dates that are the same as the tree that produced the date that the seed was taken from. They plant 50 trees per acre with one of those being a male tree that they use the pollen from to hand pollinate the other 49.
The Salton Sea is on down the road a few miles. The elevation is 227 feet below sea level and cover 360 square miles. The salinity is higher than the Pacific ocean but considerably less than Salt Lake in Utah. It is sustained largely by agricultural drainage and storm runoff. They say it was formed by accident about 100 years ago. The Colorado River broke through an irrigation canal and due to the high volume of water flowing in it took 16 months to stop the flow and divert it back to its original channel. The result was a new lake 45 miles long and 25 miles wide.