The 2026 Badwater Salton Sea got under way on Saturday 18 April in California's Anza-Borrego desert, sending teams of two and three runners on one of ultra-running's most unusual point-to-point routes: 81 miles of road and trail from the edge of the Salton Sea to the summit of Palomar Mountain, climbing from 234 feet below sea level to 5,500 feet over a single continuous effort.
Presented this year by the Mount to Coast running brand, the race is hosted by AdventureCORPS, the event organisation founded by Chris Kostman that also operates the Badwater 135 in July and Badwater Cape Fear in March. Unlike the desert 135, Salton Sea is not a solo event. Each team must finish together, with every registered runner required to complete the entire course rather than handing off sections in relay fashion, a format that has long distinguished the event from the rest of the AdventureCORPS calendar.
The course itself is an unusually varied traverse for a point-to-point ultra. Runners start on the low desert flats outside Salton City, climb steadily through Borrego Springs and Ranchita, and pick up an eight-mile single-track section inside Anza-Borrego Desert State Park before tackling the long paved ascent up Palomar Mountain Road. Total climbing exceeds 9,000 feet and much of the final twenty miles is an unbroken uphill grind to the observatory-famous summit, a profile that rewards disciplined pacing and punishes teams that attack the early flats too hard.
Team logistics are central to the event's identity. Each unit must travel with a fully stocked support vehicle and a rotating crew, and the race's timing checkpoints are deliberately spaced to allow teams to regroup rather than split apart on climbs. AdventureCORPS has kept the invitation-only field deliberately small for 2026 to preserve that atmosphere, with the majority of competitors returning veterans and many using Salton Sea as a qualifying or preparatory event for the main Badwater 135 in Death Valley later in the summer.
Live coverage is running across the AdventureCORPS Flickr feed and the event's social channels through Sunday 19 April as teams work their way up Palomar, with final finishers expected late in the day. Full results will be posted to the Badwater and UltraRunning Magazine calendars once the last team has cleared the summit, at which point attention inside the AdventureCORPS office will shift to Death Valley, where registered Badwater 135 entries have already begun their final heat-training blocks for the 27-29 July event.