Opinion: The Salton Sea’s weirdness is what’s appealing

Home to only 150 or so people most of the year, the Salton Sea in southern California—“created by the collision of geology and bad luck”—swells to 4,000 during the winter as people come to escape the cold, writes Dennis Hinkamp. He makes an annual pilgrimage to the sea's dusty, salt-encrusted shores for a week, relishing its peculiar delights. Those include true stories about the area's life as a bombing range, which sent World War II dummy bombs and crashed planes to a watery grave.