Spring Trip 2009: California's Imperial Valley

Part of the Spring Trip 2009 series.

After leaving Tucson on Friday afternoon, we took the long drive west on I-10 and I-8, through Yuma, to El Centro, California. El Centro is the county seat of Imperial County, a place that would have no reason to exist were it not for the water taken (some would say “stolen”) from the Colorado River at Imperial Dam (north of Yuma) and diverted down the All-American Canal to grow the salad vegetables of a hungry nation.

El Centro is about ten miles north of Calexico, and slightly more than that from Calexico's much larger cross-border sister, Mexicali. El Centro is also fifteen miles south of Brawley, another agricultural town, and twice that from Calipatria on the southern shore of the Salton Sea. Most of the broadcast spectrum in the area is taken up in Mexicali, but El Centro is old enough to have a heritage three-letter call, KXO, and its sister FM, KXO-FM—and that was enough to draw us on a 120-mile side trip. (El Centro has another AM and an LPFM, nearby Heber has an AM, Brawley has an AM and two FMs, and Calexico has two FMs, one a rather late drop-in FM hard by the Mexican border. Other FMs are licensed to Imperial, Holtville, and Calipatria. Mexicali has eleven AMs and twelve FMs.)

We got in to El Centro after dark on Friday evening. (It's a confusing TV market, by the way, with California stations on Pacific time but most service coming from Yuma, which is on Mountain Standard Time year-round. During the eight months of the year when California observes daylight time and Arizona does not, the nominal local time is the same in both states, but the Arizona stations run a Mountain Time schedule, with network prime time from 7 to 10. Even worse, during the winter months, Mountain prime time runs from 6 to 9 pm Pacific. There are two stations in the market licensed to Yuma, two licensed to El Centro, and one licensed to Calipatria. All of the TV stations transmit from Black Mountain in far eastern Imperial County, about forty miles north-northwest of Yuma and sixty miles northeast of El Centro.)

On Saturday morning, we headed out early to see the various sites of El Centro and Brawley before heading back east to hit Yuma and then head up into the Colorado River Valley towards our stop that night in Laughlin, Nevada.

KGBA-FM 100.1

KUBO tower

KSEH/KMXX tower

KSIQ tower

KROP tower

KROP/KSIQ studios

Entravision studios

KGBA-A/F studios

KXO-A/F studios

KYFC-LP st/tx

KWST tower

KXO tower