Salton Sea State Recreation Area

I'll get this out of the way now... it smells. Bad. But it's such a weird, eerie, creepy place! It used to be a popular vacation spot and now it's abandoned. Stop by the visitor's center for a better explanation of the history of the place! Oh, and make sure your car is gassed up and that you have water, snacks, and shoes you don't mind getting a little dirty.

This app is telling people to go here. How appalling !! I’m telling you now, it’s not worth it. It is a gross and disgusting place. Terrible smell of tons of dead fish. Dead fish litter the beach!! The state of California should do something about this nasty place because people do live there in trailers. I don’t know how they put up with it. The last thing they need are tourists coming in to see this travesty. There is NOTHING to see here.

Really nice access to beach. Watch out for flies and rattlesnakes!

Bright! Bring your sunglasses!

I stayed overnight at the campground. It was a good stop between Joshua Tree NP and San Diego. My campsite has shade and a nice sun shelter and the campground wasn’t terribly busy. As people have said before, the lake is dying and the wildlife is disappearing. I didn’t notice a bad smell because all the fish have long gone (5 years ago the last one died off) but you can’t go in the water because of the toxicity 🥺 It is a sad & sobering reminder of the effect we can have on nature if we don’t take care of it! Within easy driving distance are the mud pots, obsidian butte and the painted canyon (altho you need 4 wheel drive to access this)

Beautiful place not to many people but the water is not swimable and it stinks to high heaven! Would not recommend for those who want a camp site for lake swimming and playing!

This place is dumb. Don't bother. Nothing to do. Nothing to look at, far away from anything, not even a gas station. You can visit Bombay Beach, down the road, but it literally is 20 dilapidated motor homes. Nothing worth Instagramming.

So this place has a rich history which you can read somewhere else. I went in winter around sunset and the smell was not bad. There are skeletons of fish around, but there weren’t too many. It was weird to be on a beach where the “sand” was actually bones. There were a lot of flies, but also a lot of birds. This place is worth a trip to see because the surrounding area is so weird and also because it might not be here in the future !

This place is dead, i'm the most literal way. This spot is a must sea in the way: birds and flies feed off dried fish corpse on a white beach of bones and crushed seashells.

I used to live there when I was a kid back i the late 70s and early 80s