Salvation Mountain Didn’t Save Anyone and That’s Okay

We were somewhere on the edge of the Anza Borrego desert when the diuretics started to take hold. My friend Jean said something like, “We should pull over,” and I replied with something along the lines of, “Sounds good; I’m a pro.” We had a purpose for being so far east: Salvation Mountain.

East of San Diego County is the infamous failed-resort-town Salton Sea City and its namesake, the Salton Sea itself. A little farther east of the Salton Sea, at its southern end, the 111 highway will bring you down to Niland. Follow Niland’s mainstreet out of town, farther east still, and you’ll cross the railroad tracks on your way to Salvation Mountain, the marker for the entrance to Slab City.

After the tracks, you’ll see this convenient assurance painted on an outhouse-like structure. Jean was beyond accommodating when it came to me wanting to photograph everything. She pulled over to let me snap this:

When we clambered back in the car, a truck drove by slowly from up ahead, rolled down its window, and the driver shouted to us a garbled question that sounded like a query about the time. We didn’t engage and Jean drove onward.

That incoming construction, however, serves as a both assurance and warning.

At this point, I said I didn’t realize Salvation Mountain was in such close proximity to Slab City. Or near Slab City at all, for that matter. I asked Jean if she was familiar with the place, and when she said she wasn’t, I gave her a brief explanation. Here it is for you all.

Slab City champions itself as “the last free place” and outlets such as Vice News refer to it as, essentially, an “enclave of anarchy.” Considering the area has no electricity, running water, sewers, toilets or trash pickup service, the inhabitants are on their own and off-the-grid. And they’ve found a way to make it work, so I hear.

As interesting and intriguing as Slab City is, this won’t be about the enclave because we didn’t venture into it. There was, however, a painted phone number on a makeshift sign post that offered tours. So, uh, satiate your curiosity.

Back to Salvation Mountain. Slab City resident Leonard Knight constructed a three-story high piece of art with adobe, straw, and lead-free paint. And when I say paint, I mean a lot of paint. Behold.

The colorful mountain is impressive enough on its own, but coupled with the religious iconography, biblical references, and the copious amount of abandoned vehicles, some surrounded by the same paint cans used to paint it, Salvation Mountain becomes a tribute to the tenacity of a zealot — he even rebuilt it after the first attempt collapsed. In 2014, Knight passed away in nearby (not Slab City) assisted living. Since then, volunteers preserve and watch over Salvation Mountain.

It isn’t just a mirage in the desert, however. The Folk Art Society of America recognized it as a site for preservation in 2000 and, in 2012, California Senator Barbara Boxer called it “a unique and visionary sculpture…a national treasure…profoundly strange and beautifully accessible, and worthy of the international acclaim it receives.”

To the right of the mountain topped with a cross, a hovel complete with beams latticing the ceiling allows visitors to step inside the erection.

Around the mountain, rusted-down RVs, motorcycles, and dump trunks colored with biblical verse and paint hold vigil.

From every direction, the ever-present cross can be seen atop Salvation Mountain. Although the mountain, and Slab City beyond it, are amazing feats of “outsider art” and a rejection of mainstream bourgeois values, there’s something unsettling about the space. Maybe it’s the echoes of a lost American Dream from the westerly Salton Sea or the desolate expanse to the east punctuated only by Ironwood State Prison off of Interstate 10.

Its broken bookends do make me wonder, do the Slabbers have it right when they believe society is impossible to resuscitate, or are they just more zealots in the desert?

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