Leonard Knight came to Niland in 1984 meaning to stay a week. He had spent years trying to launch a hot air balloon painted with a message about God's love, and it never flew. So he decided to build something that would stay put instead, on a hillside of desert clay at the edge of Slab City, the squatter community on the concrete pads of an abandoned Marine base.
The first mountain went up over five years and collapsed in 1989, too much sand in the mix. Knight took it as instruction rather than defeat and started again in 1990, this time with adobe clay dug on site and straw donated by Imperial Valley farmers, shaping rounded forms by hand. That one held. Over the next two decades he added terraces, a chapel roofed with tree limbs and tires, a yellow brick road climbing the face, and layer after layer of donated latex paint, hundreds of thousands of gallons of it, until the whole hill read as a single work: GOD IS LOVE, in letters visible from the road.
Knight lived at the foot of it in a truck without power or water, greeting whoever showed up, until his health failed in 2011. He died in 2014 at eighty-two. Congress entered the mountain into the record as a national treasure in 2002, and a nonprofit run by his family keeps repainting it, because in this climate the work is never finished.
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