Salvation in the California Desert

Mike McPhate
The California Sun
Published in
3 min readNov 28, 2017

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Salvation Mountain is located just outside the sleepy town of Niland. (Wayne Stadler/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Seven miles east of the Salton Sea, a candy-colored monument to Christianity rises from the desert floor.

Known as Salvation Mountain, it is the life’s work of an itinerant eccentric from Vermont named Leonard Knight, who built the installation over 30 years with mud, hay and thousands of buckets of paint.

The result is a psychedelic swirl of pinks, reds, greens, yellows and blues adorned with giant-lettered biblical verses and a white cross atop the peak.

Gallerists have called Salvation Mountain one of the country’s most important public artworks. Senator Barbara Boxer said it was a national treasure.

Leonard Knight built the installation as a testament to his religious faith. (Credit: Thomas Hawk/CC BY-NC 2.0)

So when Knight died in 2014 at age 82 some worried whether it would survive.

A group of Knight’s admirers formed a nonprofit, Salvation Mountain Inc., to look after it.

They added a full-time caretaker and hosted painting touch-up parties.

“It needs constant work,” said Dan Westfall, the group’s president. “The desert is a pretty harsh climate.”

The work is funded with money that visitors leave in a donation box at the site. Lately it’s been flush.

Last year, Westfall explained, the Chinese reality program “I Supermodel” filmed an episode at Salvation Mountain. The show has roughly 40 million viewers.

Since then, half a dozen tour companies have sprung up in Los Angeles that bring van loads of Japanese, Korean and Chinese tourists to the mountain. Westfall said roughly 2,000 people visit each week.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “People are actually flying from these countries, landing in L.A. and getting a tour to come see the mountain.”

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Mike McPhate writes the California Sun newsletter. (Sign up! californiasun.co). Formerly of the New York Times and Washington Post.