Salvation Mountain

Salvation Mountain is the 30-year-and-then-some project of Leonard Knight. He painted a three-story-high hill and added onto it with adobe and bales of hay. Complete with grottos, chapels, tunnels, painted trailers and vehicles. The main theme is God is Love. Unfortunately, Leonard was recently taken to a nursing home, so I missed meeting him by just a few weeks when my son and I visited just before Christmas.

This was also the case with St. Anthony's, a Catholic Church in Pittsburgh that I visited in November (the most relics next to the Vatican). The Irish nun who led the tours of the church and its collection had just been taken to a retirement home a few days before I visited. I guess this is telling me I need to go to these obscure places as soon as possible before the generation that still thought of doing anything "out there" dies off.

Here are a few photos of Salvation Mountain. What a fabulous place. Unfortunately, with no caretaker, I suspect vandals and souvenir hawks will soon be "having at it." Such a shame. It's a magical place, a very rare place in today's homogeneous, rush-rush, gotta-have-the-latest-electronic-gadget world. Someone with a real vision--not to make money, but to manifest his inner world in the outer world. A dying breed, sad to say.