23 June - Vegas – Desert Hot Springs

Leaving Vegas we travelled South. We passed another huge solar power bank- heaps of panels and they must be generating a lot because there were plenty of EHV lines on towers heading out over the desert. 

Other than that, not much. Tumbleweeds and Joshua trees. 

And windy! The RV battled the cross winds all the way. Crossing the Californian border was funny. Nevada side: 3 lanes in each direction, divided road, lovely road surface. Suddenly down to 1 lane in each direction, not divided, road a bit crappy. A cattle grid marked the border. We followed the green corridor of the Colorado River for a while along Route 66 into a town called Needles. Lots of Route 66 signs and murals. Kind of quaint. 

Heading toward Palm Springs we could see the Salton Sea in the distance. It’s an interesting story. It’s below sea level and was created by a flood in 1905. The area had been used as farm land via some irrigation channels from the Colorado. During the 1905 floods, the Colorado breached the headgates of the channels and flowed into the Salton sink, creating massive waterfalls and 2 new rivers 60 miles long that carried the entire Colorado River flow into the basin, submerging the town of Salton and the railroad. The building of the Hoover Dam in 1935 stopped the flooding and enabled the Colorado to be diverted back to its original watercourse, but the Salton Sea remained. It is the 3^rd biggest lake in California and was set to be a huge resort /tourist area. However, over time with evaporation the sea has become progressively more salty to the point where the fish died and it now stinks of dead fish. So the resorts were abandoned and now sit as ghost towns. Boaters still use it because the high salt content means that boats float well and can go faster than usual. Overnight at Desert Hot Springs. Even though the RV park was well sheltered, it was so windy that the RV swayed sickeningly all night, not a lot of sleep.