Salvation Mountain

I had another landmark conversation. Went like this: “Slab City? You don’t want to go there…it’s full of hippies and religious wackos…unless maybe that’s what you are.”

“Sir, I don’t care for your tone,” I told him. I was talking to a couple of duck hunters in the parking lot of a wildlife area.

I saw the Salton Sea on the map after I fled that godforsaken parking lot I had been sitting in for three days…looked online and found Slab City and Salvation Mountain. It’s described as a mecca for RV people and bursting with character. So I headed there.

But it was dark. I wasn’t sure where I was going, and overshot my turn by four miles once I found a patch of earth big enough to turn this aircraft carrier around.

Pulled off next to a hunter’s check station and walked to a brightly lit camp trailer, strung with Christmas lights. It looks occupied, but isn’t. The two duck hunters drive up, father and son. Dressed in full camo with the back of their truck filled with decoys.

They warn me off of Slab City and say, “Hell, you can come sit around our campfire if you want. You wouldn’t catch me going to that Slab City, nuh-uh…that’s where that missing girl last week was missing.”

I’m not clear on the missing girl…whether she was missed from there, found there…turns out it’s both. I look it up later and find that a young woman had been hanging out at Slab City, left there, her car broke down, she got a ride back to Slab City and then heard her car had been found and she was presumed missing. She called the sheriff to de-miss-tify herself. Case closed.

I thanked the duck hunters for their kind offer, spent the night in a parking lot marked out with firehose lines, then backtracked in the morning to Niland, California, took a left and went three miles to see Salvation Mountain and Slab City.

It’s a decommissioned military base, buildings torn down leaving concrete slabs that RVers like to park on, thus the name.

Salvation Mountain is a brightly painted folk art-looking religious monument created by Leonard Knight. You may remember Leonard, his mountain and Slab City from seeing them in the movie, ‘Into the Wild.’ Chris McCandless hung out here.

Well, the duck hunters are missing out. This place is more intriguing than anywhere I’ve been in a while and it turns out people really do find salvation at Salvation Mountain.

More on that later.