The Salton Sea & Salton City...
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Salton City is a census-designated place (CDP) in Imperial County, California, United States. The population was 978 at the 2000 census. It is part of the 'El Centro, California Metropolitan Statistical Area'. Although maps (such as those seen at Google Maps[1]) at first glance show Salton City to be a sizable community, in fact very few of the surveyed streets and roads were ever developed. The town was developed in the 1950s as a resort community on the Salton Sea, but as the salinity of the already highly polluted sea rose, very little development took place and much of what was built - including the city's marina - was abandoned.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea
Basically, you drive to this place and there is this beautiful (because it's completely placid) sea in the middle of the desert. What you don't realize is that it is completely polluted and disgusting. Once people realized that the water was being diverted down from the Colorado River, they built resorts and stuff everywhere, or at least planned for it. If you go visit the area now, it's straight out of a horror film - dolls with eyes missing, the tops of houses sticking out of the sand/dirt, bicycles half buried. When you walk through the sand, it cracks underneath your feet and in the cracks the substance underneath is this sickly red color.
It's a crazy place.