Imperial Valley
— — the desert the river was made to feed.
Not only on a wall.
“Imperial Valley is a strip of farmland in the far south of California, most of it sitting below sea level. The Colorado River, diverted through the All-American Canal, turned the desert green a century ago. Romaine and sugar beets grow where the Salton Sea's southern edge still hisses with salt. The valley reads flat and wide and warm, even in February, and the light goes a long way before it hits anything.
Imperial Valley, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Imperial Valley occupies the southern end of the Salton Trough in California's Imperial County, between the Mexican border and the Salton Sea. Most of the valley floor lies below sea level, falling to about 70 metres below near the sea's southern shore. The county seat is El Centro, founded in 1906; Brawley and Calexico flank it north and south. The valley is the southernmost portion of the larger Sonoran Desert and one of the hottest inhabited regions in the United States, with summer highs that pass 45 °C in most years.
Almost nothing grows here without the Colorado River. The All-American Canal, completed in 1942, carries water 132 kilometres west from Imperial Dam to a delivery network that irrigates roughly 200,000 hectares of cropland. Before the canal, an earlier 1905 diversion failed catastrophically and the river ran into the basin for nearly two years, refilling the Salton Sea. The sea remains the canal's accidental child, fed now mostly by farm runoff. Lettuce, sugar beets, alfalfa, broccoli, and the country's winter melons all come out of this water.
The valley's working season is winter. From November through March, daytime highs sit between 18 and 24 °C and the romaine, broccoli, and carrot harvests run hard; most of America's winter leafy greens ship out of these fields. Summers are punishing — El Centro's average July high near 42 °C makes it one of the hottest counties in the country, and only the date palms and Bermuda grass really thrive. Migratory birds arrive at the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge in November and stay through February, when the air finally cools.