Drive along the coast of the Salton Sea into Niland, CA (just one hour southeast from Coachella), and all you can see for miles is long, flat stretches of sand and dirt. And then suddenly, Salvation Mountain emerges bright and mighty from the dusty planes. The Mountain, a technicolor oasis covered with birds and flowers and scripture, rises up from a hand-painted Sea of Galilee. At its top, a giant white cross.
In 1967, a thirty-five-year-old Leonard Knight was in San Diego visiting his sister Irene, a God-loving woman with a penchant for sermonizing. “I never loved God one minute of my life. I just hated God, hated church, hated everything,” Leonard would say when recanting his story to visitors and media people.
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One morning, to escape his sister’s preaching, Leonard walked outside and sat in his van. With no one around, for reasons unbeknownst to him, Leonard began crying out the same prayer he would paint onto the side of his self-made mountain years later, “Jesus I’m a sinner please come upon my body and into my heart.” He repeated the prayer ten, maybe fifteen times. “Jesus I’m a sinner! Please come into my heart!” Tears came to his eyes, and so began Leonard’s love story.
Before there was the Mountain there was a dream of a hot air balloon that would float across the whole country sharing a simple message: God is Love. Leonard returned to Vermont with a burning conviction that would not fade. One day, a hot air balloon floated over Burlington and Leonard noticed how all the town’s kids were asking, “What does that balloon say?” And Leonard looked up too and said, “God Almighty, I want a hot air balloon.”
Leonard Knight, Salvation Mountain, 2002.
He then set to work sewing a hot air balloon and didn’t stop for fifteen years. He collected scraps from the dumpsters of balloon manufacturers and patched together a balloon that stretched 230 feet high with “God is Love” written in ten-foot tall letters.
At some point during that time he had landed himself in Nebraska where the weather proved too harsh and windy for his balloon to take flight. Leonard packed his truck—painted with Bible verses and colorful depictions of birds, flowers, and polka dots—with his balloon, and a homemade inflating furnace that he called “the apparatus” and drove halfway across the country until his truck broke down in a relatively off-grid place in the California Desert.
Leonard arrived at Slab City intent on making one last attempt at launching his balloon. The snowbirds—nomads that would travel down to the Slabs during the winter months—helped him finish the balloon and prepare it for flight. They unrolled the layers and layers of patchy synthetic nylon only to discover, to Leonard’s horror, that the balloon had begun to rot.
Nearly fifteen years of quiet and diligent stitching laid at his feet in a state of slow decay and Leonard, at first, felt defeated. He decided he’d stay just one week to build a small monument before leaving to discover what God would call him to next. With just half a bag of cement, Leonard began constructing his monument on the face of a mesa he spotted right at the entrance of the Slabs.
One week turned to one month turned to one year, and Leonard just kept on building. He packed junk and trash onto the side of the mesa and mixed cement with sand to pour over it all, and slowly but surely he built a mountain. On the side of his mountain he wrote “God is Love” in big red letters on a white background, perhaps as homage to his balloon.
Roughly four years passed and each day Leonard continued working on his mountain until one day, under the weight of his ill-made cement mixture, the mountain slid loose and collapsed. Forever the bright-eyed believer, Leonard thanked God for showing him the mountain was not safe and vowed to start again but with more careful planning.
So, Leonard built another mountain. He dug into the mesa more steeply this time, using a front-end loader that a kind visitor had donated to him and that he had, of course, painted with his signature flowers, birds, dots, and bible verses. He shaped his adobe and mixed his paints and, once again, built up his mountain using a hodgepodge of desert junk including old tractor tires, dried-out tree limbs, bits and pieces of broken down cars.
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He used cans of donated paint to seal everything together and protect it from the wind and rain. Another generous visitor donated a mixture of fifty half-used drums of paint that Leonard spent all day opening up and mixing together. For ten more years Leonard worked in the burning heat of the California sun and sometimes by flashlight at night to rebuild his mountain. He paid no taxes, no fees, and lived out of a makeshift “house” he built in his truck’s flatbed. He continued to build using the donations of kind strangers, which included everything from a moped to paint—cans and cans of paint.
At that point Leonard encountered yet another setback: in an effort to generate some sort of money from the Slabs—technically government owned land—the Imperial County Supervisors decided to start collecting a user fee. Believing that the religious monument might prove to be problematic in their efforts, the Supervisors hired a toxic waste specialist to sample the dirt around Leonard’s Mountain.
The specialist reported back claiming that the soil contained high levels of contaminants, deeming it a “toxic nightmare.” The County Supervisors petitioned the state of California for funds to tear Leonard’s mountain down and dispose of it as toxic waste. This, however, as we all know, was not the end of Salvation Mountain.
Leonard’s friends and neighbors circulated their own petitions and gathered hundreds of signatures to stop the county from tearing down the Mountain. Leonard was able to dig soil samples from the same holes the specialists had pulled from and submitted them to a lab in San Diego where new tests revealed that the toxicity levels near the Mountain were absolutely fine.
So, Leonard was able to continue growing his mountain. He built a ten-foot tall domed hogan using bales of stacked straw and then worked on what he called “the Museum”—a room inspired by his hot air balloon—that he filled with artifacts from Salvation Mountain’s humble beginnings and a plaque documenting the Mountain’s entry into the Congressional Record of the United States proclaiming it a national treasure.
Leonard passed away in February 2014, in a nursing home where he had lived the last years of his life, after the sun he had spent so much of his time building his Mountain under became too much for him. He was eighty-two years old.
To visit Salvation Mountain now is to stand in awe of the man who single-handedly worked on this singular monument for so long. Leonard survived years of extreme heat and quiet repetition: waking up and working for eight to ten hours a day, every day for nearly thirty years.
One can but I felt his spirit in nearly everything. The bright yellow stairs carved into the mesa, the scarlet heart in the center of the mountain with a simple prayer: “Jesus I’m a sinner please come upon my body and into my heart,” and the giant red “God is Love” beaming in all its glory.
In its beautiful, crooked way, it stands as a true expression of devotion–not just to Leonard’s God, but to people, and to love itself. In Leonard’s own words: “This is a love story that is staggering to everybody in the whole world. That God really loves us a lot.”
