A few miles east of Niland, in a stretch of Sonoran Desert that the military abandoned and the government never quite reclaimed, lies Slab City. The community occupies the concrete foundation slabs left behind when the Navy abandoned Camp Dunlap after World War II. No municipal services reach Slab City — no water lines, no sewage, no electricity grid, no law enforcement presence. People have been living there year-round and seasonally since the military left, drawn by the freedom of a place where the usual rules of American life simply do not apply. In winter, the population swells with snowbirds — retirees in recreational vehicles who come for the mild desert climate and stay for the community. In summer, only the most committed remain, enduring temperatures that regularly reach 115 degrees.

On the approach to Slab City, Leonard Knight spent nearly three decades building an enormous art installation from adobe mud, discarded tires, car windows, and thousands of gallons of donated paint. Salvation Mountain is 50 feet tall and sprawls across the desert floor in explosions of color — yellow suns, red hearts, a blue sky, flowers, and the repeated text of a simple Christian message that Knight spent his life communicating. He slept in a shack on a flatbed truck at the base of his creation for 27 years, welcoming visitors, repainting sections that faded or crumbled, and accepting donations that he converted almost entirely back into paint. The Folk Art Society of America declared Salvation Mountain worthy of preservation in 2000. Senator Barbara Boxer called it a national treasure in 2002. Knight died in February 2014, having given his life to a hill of paint in the desert.

North of Niland on Route 111, a geological curiosity has been testing the patience of highway engineers for years. The Niland Geyser — nicknamed the Slow One and formally designated W9 — is not actually a geyser in the geothermal sense. It is a mudpot, a pool of water and mud bubbling with carbon dioxide released by tectonic activity near the San Andreas Fault. What makes it unusual is that it moves: the pool migrates laterally across the landscape at a rate that reached ten feet per month by 2020. By the time it began threatening Route 111, mitigation projects had consumed millions of dollars and involved rerouting traffic, building temporary roadways, and eventually forcing Kinder Morgan to reroute a major petroleum pipeline. The geyser has slowed in recent years, but it continues moving, indifferent to the infrastructure in its path.

The town of Niland itself is quieter than its famous neighbors suggest. The demographics are those of rural Imperial County — predominantly Hispanic, working-class, shaped by agricultural employment and the economic rhythms of the valley. The hot desert climate is classified BWh, meaning arid, desert, and hot — which is a technical way of saying that summers are unrelenting and winters are mild and that the landscape adjusts its demands on residents accordingly. People here have lived within sight of extraordinary geological and human spectacle for generations, treating it with the equanimity that proximity tends to generate. The geyser moves. The artists build. The snowbirds come and go. Niland remains.