Behind the ’Gram: Salvation Mountain
A rainbow-painted monument in Southern California is one man’s giant love letter — and an Instagram sensation. Here’s the story behind the hashtag.
You may have seen a sprawling, colorful, desert-flanked mountain on your Instagram feed — a white telephone-pole cross extending into the sky, large sculpted letters proclaiming “God Is Love” over the front. You may have easily seen it somewhere else, too — in the background of Kesha’s “Praying” video, as a landscape in Grand Theft Auto V, or in a scene of Into the Wild where the mountain’s creator, Leonard Knight, tells actors Emile Hirsch and Kristen Stewart about the power of love.
The attention Salvation Mountain receives, in both popular culture and on our social media feeds, is not unwarranted: Made out of adobe clay, straw, and layer upon layer of paint, the 50-foot-tall monument that took nearly 20 years to build stands as a striking visual testament to the unfailing belief and persistence of the man who built it.
For Leonard Knight, the drive which pushed him to create Salvation Mountain, 80 miles south of Palm Springs, and to live beside it in his truck for nearly the rest of his life, goes back to his spiritual awakening at the age of 36. Transformed by the Sinner’s Prayer, a Christian plea of repentance, Knight was overcome by a resolution to spread a nondenominational message of love. After failed attempts at sharing the prayer through a hand-sewn hot air balloon that could not get off the ground, he began patient work on a mountain. Built from cement, sand, and personally collected junk, this mountain featured the Sinner’s Prayer and the iconic “God Is Love” message, brightening in color as Knight continued to paint it.
However, it collapsed after three years underneath the weight of the sand. What stands today is Knight’s second attempt, a stronger structure made of adobe clay and straw, adorned with flowers, scripture, and the Sinner’s Prayer in a giant red heart. Every surface is coated by 10 to 15 layers of vibrant paint.
To Knight, the help he received along the way from neighbors and visitors, from paint donations to encouragements, was nothing short of a miracle. In Salvation Mountain: The Art of Leonard Knight, Knight, who grew up in Vermont, described a childhood dream of moving to California, a place he had seen in movies that was full of helpful neighbors and close communities. “And I ended up here,” he said. “I haven’t just had the neighbors help me build it, but about ten thousand people all over the world. So maybe that’s the dream of my childhood coming true.”
Throughout the years that followed the mountain’s construction, Knight also built the Hogan, modeled after the Navajo dwelling structure, and the Museum, a structure made out of painted car tires, adobe, and straw containing gifts from visitors and friends. The resulting landscape, so vast and luminescent as to seem unreal, is a place of startling physical reality, one whose existence derives from a singular and powerful vision.
“Leonard lived to promote his message,” explains Dan Westfall, longtime friend of Wright and current president of Salvation Mountain, the organization now devoted to its maintenance. “The mountain was secondary to the message, which was simple: Ask Jesus to come into your heart, and it will transform your life. But he didn’t pound [the message] on you. He was just overjoyed that you came all the way out there to see it.”
Knight passed away in 2014, yet Salvation Mountain remains populated, both by a small team of caretakers from the organization who ensure its upkeep and by visitors who take photos lit by the hard light of the desert and the surreally vivid colors of the dignified structure behind them. Neighbor to the squatter town of Slab City, the mountain is visited daily by hundreds of people from all over the world who drive for hours to experience it. And photograph it. To date, more than 140,000 photos on Instagram have been posted under #salvationmountain, and that number is only likely to grow.
Today, the fact that these visits are possible is owed to volunteers like Westfall, who established Salvation Mountain with a couple of others who were close to Knight as a means of sustaining his legacy. Taking up the formidable job of preserving the mountain against the harsh desert weather, the caretakers and docents also give the tours that Knight conducted for visitors while he was alive. Westfall describes the impeccable restoration work of Ron Malinowski, the mountain’s primary caretaker, as “a part of what we call ‘mountain magic’ — when things that we couldn’t really control go incredibly right.”
This mountain magic, which has kept Salvation Mountain standing and full of life, can be sensed even from an Instagram feed: People pose in equally colorful outfits at its base, hot winds ruffling their hair, waving from a world whose fullness cannot be gleaned from a photo alone. In its visual uniqueness, it’s almost as though the mountain were made for Instagram decades before Instagram was even invented. Though, of course, what everyone who visits knows is that it was made to promote love.
This is what makes Salvation Mountain distinct from other backdrops you might come across on your Insta feed — behind every photo is an opportunity to experience this message of love and to interact with the physical place that is Knight’s legacy. Access to the mountain is free, though the organization accepts donations to support its preservation, and visitors are, quite literally, welcome almost anytime — the mountain’s hours are listed as “From dawn until dusk, 365 days a year.”
The mountain’s accessibility and its openness to visitors also distinguishes it from many of the natural landscapes-turned-Instagram hotspots that cannot sustain tourism. There are a lot of parallels between Salvation Mountain and striking natural landmarks like Horseshoe Bend or Muir Woods: like nature, it changes with human contact, with each step and each repair; and like certain landmarks, it has garnered a degree of Instagram fame. However, what results from this fame in natural landscapes that are not equipped to handle unexpected spikes in tourism is the phenomenon of being “loved to death.” Issues of overcrowding and mistreatment can strain a place that has become a hotspot, sometimes with irrevocable consequences.
By contrast, Salvation Mountain provides a safe alternative to places not meant to host such large surges of people. “We’re able to sustain tourism because we have Ron and the docents protecting the mountain,” Westfall says. “Leonard would be over the moon about all the publicity.”
The mountain’s caretakers consider people’s desire to come and take photographs as a welcome opportunity to have a meaningful experience in a novel setting. And the very nature of Knight’s mission — to spread the message of God’s love through this physical monument — aligns well with the nature of Instagram, where shared photos inspire viewers to visit the beautiful places in their feeds.
Yet unlike popular Instagram spots which were created with the intention of being photographed, Salvation Mountain’s virtual popularity is purely incidental, a side effect of its distinctiveness. From the beginning, Knight’s goal was to make his message known: “I want to be a part of bringing love to the world,” he said. “I painted the mountain because I love God and I love people, and I want everybody to talk about God’s love.” However, he could never have anticipated the role that social media platforms like Instagram would play in facilitating that propagation. That’s part of its charm — Knight built it driven only by the fire of his belief, and was delighted when people began to notice it. And people notice it because it is inimitable, striking enough from a screen to make them willing to travel to the remote and sparsely populated desert in which it resides.
More than anything, what has allowed such a place to thrive is the spirit of Knight’s devotion which permeates it. Westfall recalls a time when Knight captivated a group of teenage boys visiting from the local penitentiary. “Leonard gave them respect. It’s really that simple. He didn’t judge anybody.” It’s a sentiment that he extended to all who came to visit, whether or not they had an iPhone camera in hand: “People came to look at the art, or people came for the spiritual part of it. But you bring to it what you bring, and Leonard was happy about that.”
About the author: Maddie Kim is an undergraduate at Stanford University. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, and The Adroit Journal, among others.
