Tell It on the Mountain : Modern-Day John the Baptist’s Hill in the Desert Is a Multicolored Obsession

When his hot-air balloon with “God Is Love” emblazoned on the side succumbed to desert rot, Leonard Knight knew he needed a better way to spread the good news.

So he decided to paint a few biblical phrases on a hilly mound near the broken truck he calls home in a gravelly and desolate Imperial County squatters’ encampment known as Slab City.

That was seven years ago.

Knight, 62, has been painting brightly colored religious messages and soothing pastoral scenes ever since. And his vision has grown into something he calls Salvation Mountain.

Others call it Leonard’s Mountain, one man’s multicolored obsession, the work of a modern-day John the Baptist who has ventured into the harsh desert to preach repentance.

“I started this mountain with $3 and I was only going to build something eight to 10 foot tall,” Knight said. “People came and said there was old paint and cement at the dump, and I said, ‘Well, sir, if you bring it, I’ll pound it with a sledgehammer’ and make the mountain bigger.

“That’s what has happened.”

Technically, the mountain is a sloping, terraced hill about three stories high and 100 feet long and crowned with a cross. Knight has lovingly sculpted and painted it with “God Is Love,” the full text of John 3:16, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sinner’s Prayer, a painted American flag and scenes of streams, waterfalls, green valleys, flowers, ocean waters and much more.

The venue may seem an unusual one for artistic expression, but Knight has a built-in audience.

His mountain is beside the only entrance to Slab City, an abandoned military base where more than 5,000 “snowbirds” flock every winter in their recreational vehicles, trailers, tents and other modes of portable housing for a rent-free lifestyle.

“Leonard’s Mountain is the first thing you see when you come to Slab City,” said Linda Barnett, 43, who has lived in a trailer at Slab City for five years and provides nightly news bulletins over citizens-band radio. “It reminds us that the Almighty is watching out for us.”

So bright are the mountain’s multiple shades of red, blue, green, purple, yellow, pink, black, brown and other colors that local legend holds that Salvation Mountain serves as a beacon for Navy fighters screeching toward bombing runs in the nearby Chocolate Mountains.

Penniless, rail-thin and sunburned, Knight is the object of considerable local curiosity and affection. He professes total happiness.

“People roll down their windows and give me a great big smile and ‘Hello, Leonard,’ ” he said. “The love of this mountain is enormous. I think it could be one of the biggest love stories in the West.”

Knight figures he has put 15 coats of paint on his mountain, maybe 10,000 gallons. He digs clay from the nearby hills and mixes it with water and straw into a malleable adobe that he uses to sculpt the mountain into an outdoor canvas.

He uses what is available to make his art. His text of John 3:16 is studded with a thousand marbles embedded with window putty.

In pursuit of the raw materials, Knight forages the county dump. And he depends heavily on the kindness of strangers.

Slab City regulars bring him buckets of paint. Caltrans workers bootlegged some paint from a freeway job.

Farmers donate hay for the adobe. The proprietors at Gaston’s Cafe--a 24-hour eatery in Niland popular among truckers, fishermen and hunters--give him free coffee and doughnuts.

“Leonard is an eccentric, no doubt about that,” said Walter Moore, 76, a retired cook from Las Vegas who lives in Niland (population 1,023) and is a regular at Gaston’s. “Everybody knows him. Everybody takes care of him.”

Knight agrees. “God has a way of supplying my needs,” he said.

Starting next month, Knight will get $192 a month from Social Security, a boon he plans to use to buy more paint, maybe fluorescent, so the mountain will glitter in the sun.

A native of Vermont and a onetime welder, handyman, guitar teacher, painter and body-and-fender man, Knight arrived at Slab City in the 1980s--he’s forgotten exactly when--with his truck, an old tractor and a hot-air balloon that he had been tinkering with for more than a decade.

Knight served in the Army during the Korean War, bounced around the country and was living in Nebraska and driving a truck when he decided to move to California.

Within a couple of dry years at Slab City, Knight’s hot-air balloon dream went bust.

“I made the balloon too big,” he said. “It was over 200 foot tall. It never got up. It rotted out on me. When it did, I wanted to put ‘God Is Love’ on something, I guess. So I put it on a mountain.”

Even by Slab City standards, Knight lives meagerly. He sleeps in the back of a 1951 Chevrolet truck with a burned-up engine. He shares his accommodations with a nameless cat.

As he gets older, he has made some concessions to the brutal summer heat. When the temperatures soar toward 120 degrees, Knight works on his mountain only at night, his masterpiece illuminated only by the stars and moon.

He no longer has the tractor. He sold it to pay for the printing of 13,000 postcards of his mountain, which he cheerfully gives away to anyone who stops and gawks.

For entertainment, Knight occasionally rides his bicycle three miles to Gaston’s to play a few songs on his guitar. He loves Hank Williams. He’s written a few songs himself, including a paean to Slab City:

I’m happy here in Slab City/

Old hobo road is dead.

Those ironweed trees and I are the same/

We’ve both got roots so deep./

I’m happy here in Slab City, old hobo road will keep.

He sings and praises God, but he does not proselytize.

“I don’t go to church,” he said. “But I do love the Lord and I do stick with the Bible real close. For 20 years, I’ve never messed up God’s Bible, not one word. I read it (cover to cover). I don’t understand it, but I say, ‘God, I believe it just like it is.’ ”

Like any artist, Knight has had setbacks. No one said creating a monument to the Lord in the sandy wastes east of the Salton Sea would be easy.

Lightning struck the cross atop Salvation Mountain and blasted it into a billion smoking toothpicks. Knight built a new cross from a telephone pole.

One morning, a goodly portion of the mountain slid down into a colorful but gooey mess. Knight sculpted and repainted it, and he stopped using sand in his adobe mix to reduce the chances of a second slide.

Despite the hardships, he revels in his role as artist-in-residence for his hardscrabble community.

“I know one thing: If somebody gave me $100,000 a week to move somewhere and live in a mansion and be a big shot, I’d refuse it,” he said. “I want to be right here. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”