The endurance activist trying to save California’s water
Running 100 miles is nothing for Iröndäd, so he’s using his superhuman abilities to raise awareness of the dire environmental issues surrounding the Salton Sea in Southern California.
The Salton Sea Run
This weekend, a man is going to run approximately 90 miles around the largest lake in California. So what? I wrote about 200-mile races last week. Distance-wise, this is small fry, relatively speaking.
But this is the third annual Salton Sea Run, one of the most unique runs in the country. And Iröndäd is the man running along the rapidly-receding shoreline to raise awareness of the problems around water management in Southern California.
Mapping for a cause
I heard about Iröndäd’s environmental activism either last year or the year before, but it took until this year to grab me. It was the compelling visual aid of the mapped shoreline that suddenly had the attention of this Geography graduate and self-professed map geek.
While Iröndäd is predicted to run less than 90 miles this weekend as he circumnavigates the dying body of water, last year the shoreline was 92 miles around. It was 96 miles the year before. Those two years of overlaying the maps of the shoreline are a fast visual aid to showing how quickly the Salton Sea is shrinking. But why run for up to 40 hours through terrain far less favorable than a Javelina or Cocodona?
“There’s no other way to track the shoreline of the Salton Sea. You can’t drive a vehicle or ride a bike out there – the mud is very, very soft and deep. You could take a drone and get the GPS coordinates, but it’s very difficult. The only real way to do it is to just run it.”
The Salton Sea: a brief timeline of events
I first read about the problems around the Salton Sea almost 12 years ago, and while the exodus began in the 1970s, it’s clear that the lake and the surrounding communities were doomed from the very start.
1905 - The Colorado River burst its banks due to hurricane-level rainfall and proceeded to flood the Salton Sink, an ancient dry bed 170 miles east of Los Angeles, for two whole years, forming the Salton Sea.
1924 - President Coolidge designates the Salton Sea an “agricultural sump” - somewhere for agricultural runoff from neighboring farms to be deposited, which “makes it at times smelly, oftentimes murky, soupy, green mess,” according to Iröndäd.
1929 - A small town, Bombay Beach was established. At 223 feet below sea level, it is the lowest community in the USA. Yacht clubs, golf courses, and marinas sprung up around the resort town. The Salton Sea was stocked with various fish to attract anglers.
1950s - With its sunny weather and beautiful scenery, the Salton Sea was a luxury destination rivaling Yosemite for numbers of tourists. It was hugely popular for fishing, as well as water sports, and seemed to have a promising future.
1976 - A swell from a tropical storm was so massive that a flood took out the first couple of blocks of Bombay Beach. A 15ft dirt berm was then built beyond that, around the beachside community in hopes of salvaging the town’s future, but only served to awkwardly cordon off a new ghost town.
An ecological disaster
After that crippling flood, it was clear that the area was doomed as an outdoor playground and more and more people decamped for better options. Agricultural runoff led to algal blooms as well as toxic levels of selenium in the fish, ending the fishing industry. As the tourists abandoned the area, the Salton Sea’s residents were ultimately forgotten. There are just 230 residents of Bombay Beach today.
The region is, by all reports, an ecological disaster, to the point that $750 million in federal and state funding has been designated to the restoration of the region.
Here are the main problems:
As the “shallow puddle” reduces by a couple of feet, dozens more square miles of lakebed, or playa, is exposed, which turns to dust that is easily blown by desert winds, reducing air quality and increasing respiratory disease for local residents in the poorest county in California.
97% of the millions of fish that were in the Salton Sea in 1999 are now gone, due to rising fertilizer-related salinity and shrinking water volume. As they rot, the stench can be overwhelming.
These are large-scale ecological problems that nobody would doubt require three-quarters of a billion dollars to remedy. What can one man do to help solve either disaster?
The work of the Environmental Athlete
Enter William “Iröndäd” Sinclair. He settled in Bombay Beach in 2021 after falling in love with the Salton Sea while living a nomadic life during Covid. He’d been running endurance sports for a decade, but got tired of optimizing his race times, and competing.
Whether you call him an Endurance Activist or an Environmental Athlete, the concept is the same. He’s running an extreme distance (for the third year in a row), to raise awareness of an environmental issue close to his heart.
“I ultimately found [competition] less fulfilling than using this endurance that I spend a lot of time building to do meaningful things. I really would love it if more endurance athletes also found that they have this gift to use to promote causes that they care about.”
“When we do things like run for a particular cause, you’re showing people, ‘Here’s how much I care.’ And you’re raising the question with them: ‘Should I care as well?’”
It’s fair that running three and a half marathons through soft, deep mud should be seen as a superhuman feat. Only 1% of the world has run a single marathon distance, after all, let alone further than that. If you’re deeply entrenched in the ultrarunning community, however, which is just a tenth of the marathoning community, it can be easy to lose sight of that.
Using headlines like the one above to bring more people closer to a sustainable lifestyle is a worthy move.
“I see it as a true privilege to be able to run around the Salton Sea. I don’t need to worry about making money to keep a roof over my head, so I do feel a certain responsibility to the people in Imperial County. Tons of people there are struggling day to day and would never be able to do something like this, just because they need to spend their time taking care of their families, but we’re in the same boat when it comes to the impacts of the water policies that have led to this situation.”
What are Iröndäd’s goals?
The money (and intention) is there on both federal and state levels to bring the Salton Sea back to life, but it’s a matter of bureaucracy: the work needs realistic local human direction, and he wants to give that.
“The goal isn't to bring the sea back to where it was before the ecological collapse. That can't be replicated.”
“It's that there are certain mitigations that they are putting into place right now, and some are better than others. The fact is they have a lot of money for these mitigations.”
“They can either spend it on things like providing an important stop along the Pacific Flyway for migratory birds – a huge ecological function of the Salton Sea that could be restored through wetlands – or they can spend money on things that destroy the natural beauty of the sea and have no benefit other than mitigating dust.”
Iröndäd is talking about the way those in charge of the budget drop a load of straw bales next to shoreline to help vegetation grow without considering a freshwater source for that vegetation (there isn't one), or how five-foot furrows are ploughed in the playa to reduce dust.
“[Those actions] disregard it as if this area is not worth saving in terms of a place for people to visit. I describe the Salton Sea as remarkably beautiful, especially when viewed from a distance, and that you can still recreate here. It just isn’t a beautiful place to go water skiing and swimming.”
As a resident, Iröndäd is a year-round activist, attending meetings and “getting the local perspective out there.”
“We’re missing the perspective of the people who live here on the Salton Sea. The management program never reaches out, so them just hearing that voice… it only takes one person in the room.”
Raising awareness of water management
The most important thing Iröndäd wants to accomplish is learning from the Salton Sea situation and transferring that knowledge to other lakeside communities. He tells me massive destruction and die-offs have already happened to Owens Lake (“It’s gone. It’s dry.”). He lists Walker Lake in Nevada and Mono Lake (which alone provides up to 3% of Los Angeles’ water) as being in the same boat, but the latter has “very concrete calls to action that could make a big difference, and bring it back to what it was.”
“This isn't just happening here. This is happening everywhere in the Southwest, where we've decided we're going to divert massive amounts of water to coastal cities.”
In 2022, only 10% of LA’s water came from local groundwater, and just 2% came from recycled water. Yes. Pathetic. 73% was purchased from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which was formed in 1928 to bring water to SoCal from the Colorado River.
73% of LA’s water travels 300 miles, passing just north of the Salton Sea, but all those lakes listed above are emblematic of the relentless water consumption of modern cities. Not only do we residents have to be incentivized to capture rainwater on our properties, we can’t even effectively recycle the water that we use.
“We don't have to keep repeating this, but it's going to be a matter of understanding what's happened here and why. The most important thing is for us to look at this directly and internalize that we did this through our water policy, and through our value system, really, and these are the consequences.”
Whether he’s in the management program’s meetings being the lone voice for the community, or raising general awareness of how a city’s water usage negatively affects distant communities, Iröndäd intends to run the shoreline of the Salton Sea every year until there’s no shoreline left.
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Thanks for reading
- Raz
This is so epic, what a cause to run for!
“When we do things like run for a particular cause, you’re showing people, ‘Here’s how much I care.’ And you’re raising the question with them: ‘Should I care as well?’”
10000%
Thanks for this reporting. I admire his activism.