Mud Pots of the Salton Sea

**pegleglooker** · Apr 22, 2009, 03:46 PM

hey gang,
While I was out on my " big " trip, I stopped along the Salton Sea and got to look at the mud pots. I found this explanation online and though he said it better than I could, so here ya go.... ( I took the pixs though

)

Enjoy
PLL

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

The witches in Macbeth would feel at home here at the area correctly, but unfortunately, known as the Davis-Schrimpf Seep Field, a tongue-twister name of an unmarked location at the bend of two dirt roads between Highway 111 and the southeastern edge of the Salton Sea.

As you approach the site clearly in view from the road, mini-volcanoes, called gryphons, protrude skyward like large ant hills. If the sun and dry weather haven't yet hardened the otherwise spider-veined and salty flat tabletop of earth, you might face a strenuously muddy slog. Deep, deep footprints attest to past visits of courageous visitors whose mud-caked bodies were probably strapped to the roofs of their cars for the dirty ride home.

Some of the gryphons here are surrounded by briny waters tinted in brown, green or red. Interspersed among these rumbling and steaming cones are holes in the ground: mud pots. Some are empty, some are sleeping, and some are filled with bubbling or oozing fits of oily grey mud. The scene here looks like a wild drunken orgy of potters reveled through the night then disappeared as the sun rose on the horizon. They left behind nature's original lava lamp.

Pumping the atmosphere and your aural senses are the various vents, holes, and cracks all around you that penetrate the air with a soft sulfurous aroma and an orchestra of sound that can change its melody during the day and its tune overnight. You're standing on the lungs of the earth in permanent exhalation. Percolating coffee, a jangling bag of empty soda cans, water dripping into a large steel kettle, a snotty child blowing its nose, an invalid wheezing on a breathing tube, a tea pot whistling, a barista making your latte, a solitary diner slurping his soup, inhaling the last drops of juice through a straw, ooma loompas making chocolate on the Willy Wonka assembly line -- walk around these mud pots and gryphons long enough and you, too, will identify such an endless list of recognizable sounds that you'll barely remember them all.

[youtube=425,350]v=LJV4ws1pZQQ[/youtube]

Like a lava flow