---
title: "The Salton Sea: Better Late Than Never"
date: "2026-03-03T15:47:06-07:00"
modified: "2026-06-03T16:30:45-07:00"
author: KimClaude
url: "https://kimstuart.net/salton-sea-east-jesus-salvation-mountain-bombay-beach"
categories: Cool Travel Photos
tags: Bombay Beach, california, East Jesus, outsider art, public art, road trip, Salton Sea, Salvation Mountain
description: I have wanted to see the Salton Sea for literally years. It took a dentist appointment in Algodones and a willing travel companion to finally make it happen.
image: "https://kimstuart.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/salton-sea-east-jesus-salvation-mountain-bombay-beach-1.jpg"
site_name: Kim's Personal Stuff
---

# The Salton Sea: Better Late Than Never

I have been meaning to get to the Salton Sea for years. Literally years. I lived in LA, I lived in Phoenix, I have driven past the turnoff more times than I can count — and somehow I never went. It took a dentist appointment in Algodones and M saying yes to a detour to finally make it happen.

We hit three spots: [East Jesus](https://eastjesus.org/), [Salvation Mountain](https://salvationmountain.us/), and [Bombay Beach](https://www.bombaybeachbiennale.org/). In that order. And honestly, the whole thing was more than I expected — which is saying something, because I had been building this up in my head for a long time.

## East Jesus

East Jesus is an experimental, habitable art installation in the Slab City area — which is itself already a thing, a community of people living off-grid on abandoned military land in the desert. East Jesus sits at the edge of all that, and it is dense. Cars covered in mosaic tile and stuffed animals, wire sculptures, found-object figures assembled from junk into something weirdly dignified. You wander and you look and you keep finding more.

The piece that got me was the white installation — everything painted white, all of it: appliances, car parts, furniture, assembled into towering figures and walls of stuff. It is not subtle. It is a pointed, direct commentary on over-consumption and what we leave behind — all this crap we accumulate, rendered monochrome and monumental. I am not an anti-capitalist by any stretch, but I found it genuinely killer. The best art doesn’t require you to agree with it to feel it.

There’s also a car covered entirely in dolls. The rear window says GIGGLE. Make of that what you will.

## Salvation Mountain

[Leonard Knight](https://salvationmountain.us/) started building Salvation Mountain in 1984 after his truck broke down nearby. He spent decades painting a manmade hill with adobe and latex paint — layer after layer — covered in Bible verses, flowers, trees, and the words GOD IS LOVE in letters you can see from a distance. He died in 2014. Volunteers maintain it now.

I don’t share Leonard’s faith, but I found the place genuinely moving. One man, one obsession, thirty years of work in the middle of the desert. There’s a sign that explains he made an 8-foot monument first, and it kept falling over, so he decided to make a bigger one. That’s the whole story, really.

The view from the top is something — painted surface underfoot, the flat brown desert in every direction, a few other visitors wandering around below looking small.

## Bombay Beach

Bombay Beach is a town on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea that has been slowly surrendering to the water and the salt and the years. It’s also become an unlikely art destination — sculptures scattered on the dry lakebed, installations inside abandoned buildings, painted TVs stacked in lots, a rusty shipwreck on a pile of rocks that has absolutely no business being there and yet fits perfectly.

The [Bombay Beach Biennale](https://www.bombaybeachbiennale.org/) brings artists out here every year. What’s left between events is a permanent-ish layer of strange things in strange places — iron silhouettes on the cracked lakebed, an octopus tentacle rising out of the salt flats, a dusty upright piano against a yellow shipping container. The museum had some genuinely lovely photography of the sea itself. And the Bombay Beach Yacht Club has a calendar. Of course it does.

The Salton Sea is dying — the water level dropping, the shoreline receding, the fish kills a recurring fact of life. Standing on what used to be a beach, with dead feathers in the salt crust and art installations planted in the emptiness, there’s something about the whole place that’s very something. I still can’t put my finger on exactly what.