Imperial Beach: End of the Line

Imperial Beach is the most southwesterly city in the continental United States. You are, right now, about as far into the corner of the country as you can drive. The name comes from Imperial Valley, the desert farm country a hundred miles east, where ranchers and farmers first came to this beach in the eighteen eighties to escape the summer heat.

For decades the area was a quiet getaway. Then in nineteen thirty-seven, a waterman named Dempsey Holder rode the big waves at the Tijuana Sloughs, just south of here, and word got out. Through the nineteen forties, surfers drove from all over Southern California to ride what were then the largest surfable waves in the continental United States. Bob Simmons, who applied hydrodynamic principles to surfboard design and became known as the father of the modern surfboard, moved here in nineteen fifty. Imperial Beach incorporated as a city in nineteen fifty-six. It remains, in every direction, the last stop before the border.