Salvation Mountain is a hillside of adobe, paint and window putty rising out of the desert near Niland, in California’s Imperial County. It was built by one man, Leonard Knight, who began in 1984 and kept adding to it for the next 27 years to spread a single message: ‘God loves everyone’. I photographed it in December 2007, while Leonard was still living on site and still building.
Meeting Leonard
I got lost on the way. I stopped in a back street in Niland and asked a young woman for directions. She gave me perfect ones, then added, ‘Say “Hi” to Leonard for me.’ Everybody knew Leonard Knight.
That same year, Leonard appeared as himself in Sean Penn’s film Into the Wild, starring Emile Hirsch, with Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener and Kristen Stewart. It tells the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young graduate who gave away his savings and travelled across America before heading alone into the Alaskan wilderness.
By then Leonard had been out in the desert for nearly 25 years. He slept in a donated truck on site, itself covered in paint and putty, and worked on the mountain and the museum beside it every day. It hadn’t been easy. An early version collapsed and he had to start again from scratch, and he once had to fight off objections to the ‘toxicity’ of his paint. The Folk Art Society of America later recognised the mountain as a work worthy of protection.
As we walked around, Leonard came over to chat, pointing things out with obvious delight: ‘That’s a car door that I found out in the desert… that tree’s all made out of tractor tires… the flowers are made from window putty…’ He told us your faith didn’t matter to him; he simply wanted everyone to know that Jesus loved them. Whether or not you share the message, the mountain stands as a testament to one man’s faith and determination, and that alone is remarkable.
Exploring the 360° tour
The 360° tour has seven scenes covering the whole mountain. From the peak you can look out over Slab City, an RV community that grew up on the concrete slabs of an abandoned Second World War army base, and see the Salton Sea in the distance.
Leonard lived at the mountain until December 2011, when ill health took him into care, and died on 10 February 2014, aged 82. These panoramas now record Salvation Mountain as it was while its maker was still at work on it.
More landscapes from the American West
- The Salton Sea: the vast inland sea you can see from the summit, created by accident in 1905
- Black Rock City, Nevada: another desert built as a work of art, this one for a single week each year
- Trona Pinnacles: tufa spires in the Mojave, shot at 54.4°C
- Sunrise at Joshua Tree: long solstice shadows where two deserts meet
- Zabriskie Point, Death Valley: ancient lake sediment sculpted into badlands
- San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm: 4,000 turbines on the road to Palm Springs
See all my California panoramas and 360s · How I shoot 360° photography