By age twenty, he had been drafted into the military, serving in the Korean War until honorably discharged. Growing up on a working farm, Knight dropped out of high school early on. Leonard Knight was born in 1931 in Shelburne Falls, Vermont. Folks have made pilgrimages from all other the globe to view and walk the mountain and, more importantly, visit with its creator. This large-scale religiously themed structure is impossible to miss. Located at the entrance of Slab City near the "seen better days" town of Niland, California, not far from El Centro and the U.S. For those uninitiated to the site, Salvation Mountain is a wonderfully odd, but highly inspirational public art installation constructed nearly single-handedly by Knight from straw, locally sourced adobe mud and discarded house paint over a nearly thirty-year period. My interest with the Salton Sea and its built environment grew to include the array of curious characters that inhabited the surreal landscape - Knight included. My ongoing obsession with the Salton Sea grew into a graduate thesis project, website and eventually a book published for the centenary of the sea's awkward creation in 1905. To say that I was overwhelmed by this strange place upon visiting is an understatement. Considered geographically a Northern Californian at the time, I was sadly, completely oblivious to the presence or background of our state's largest body of water located in a dry and economically impoverished corner of Southern California. In 1996, I had gone south to visit a former teacher of mine who was living seasonally at the Slabs east of Niland. I first met Leonard Knight around the same time I had stumbled upon the Salton Sea. Leonard Knight, Salvation Mountain, 2000.
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