Salvation Mountain

This post is one of a series about our trip to Arizona and California spanning this past New Year’s holiday. For an overview of our trip and links to other posts, please see 2018/2019 Western Trip.

“Build it and they will come” pretty much describes what has happened with the man-made Salvation Mountain.  It’s quite an endeavor that continues to develop and proclaims salvation and God’s love to all who come. And come they do: to take pictures, climb the mountain, to expand and paint the creation. It definitely is a unique creation that is best experienced in person.

Salvation Mountain is a monument to “God is Love” in Niland, CA, just east of the Salton Sea near California’s Imperial Valley. Originally created by Leonard Knight, it is made with adobe clay and straw and covered with donated paint (it is estimated that there are over 100,000 gallons of paint on the mountain). The current mountain is the second iteration – the first was made with cement and sand but it collapsed because, in an economic move, the concrete had been made with too much sand.

Salvation Mountain is a literal man-made mountain 28 years in the making, covered in half a million gallons of latex paint. What started as a small monument made of dirt and painted cement became, over time, a sprawling adobe and hay-bale mountain complex.
— Aaron Huey, National Geographic

Salvation Mountain is adjacent to Slab City, which took its name from concrete slabs that remained from the abandoned World War II Marine Corps barracks of Camp Dunlap. Slab City is largely a snowbird community with no utilities, used by recreational vehicle owners and squatters. Several thousand campers, many of them retired, use the site during the winter months. The “snowbirds” migrate north in spring to cooler climates as the temperatures in Slab City can reach 120 °F during summer.

We were there in late December and it felt quite warm! There were hundreds of people there and there was just one porta-potty that was overflowing.

Additional Information:

Salvation Mountain Website: http://www.salvationmountaininc.org

Salvation Mountain – Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_Mountain

Slab City – Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_City,_California

Additional Images

Technical Information

Slab City Tour Guide

• Date: 12/30/2018
• Time: 12:20 PM
• Camera: Canon EOS  77D
• Lens: Canon EF-S 17-55 mm f/2.8 IS USM
• Settings:
  • Lens: 52 mm, f/11
  • ISO: 200
  • Shutter: 1/400 sec
• Cropped image is 3838 x 5757 px
• GPS: 33°15’16.0″N, 115°28’26.7″W