RonnieAdventure #0052 - Mojave Phone Booth, San Bernardino County, California

 Photographer Unknown

 IT’S GONE!!!!

In the 1960s the State of California mandated that a network of phone booths be place in isolated parts of the state to service residents. To comply with the State mandate, a phone booth was located in an isolated area of the Mojave Desert 15 miles from the nearest highway and equipped with a hand-cranked magneto phone. At some time in the 1970s, the phone was updated and replaced with a touch-tone model, but the phone received very little use.

Then, in 1997, a person from Las Angeles spotted a phone icon on a map in a remote part of the Mojave Desert and decided to visit the site. He ended up writing about his adventure to the phone booth in an underground magazine and included the phone number in the article. (The original phone number was (714) 733-9969, but then the area code was change to 619 and later it was changed to 760.) The article was read by a computer geek that started a website dedicated to the Mojave Phone Booth. Soon, people started calling the phone booth from all over the world just to see if they could get a reply. Some people even took camping trips to the phone booth just to answer the phone and they kept records of how many people they visited with while they were at the phone booth. In 1999, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times visited the Phone Booth and met a man that said God had instructed him to come to the Phone Booth and answer calls. In 32 days, the man answered over 500 phone calls, with repeated calls from someone that identified himself as “Sargent Zeno from the Pentagon.”

However, on May 17, 2000, at the request of the National Park Service, Pacific Bell removed and destroyed the Phone Booth. The Park Service said that the removal was done to halt the environmental impact of visitors to the area. A headstone-like plaque was later placed at the site, but it too was removed by the Park Service because it was "unauthorized." On our adventure, we found the site as depicted on the Internet, but the only thing we could locate at the site area were some pieces of iron.

 Pieces of Iron

Over the years, the Phone Booth inspired several books and one full-length movie. In 2006 a movie titled “Mojave Phone Booth” portrayed four dysfunctional  travelers from Las Vegas that were separately drawn to the Phone Booth in hopes that the phone might suddenly ring to resolve their problems, of which they were plagued with in great abundance. I didn’t see the movie and will probably pass on that one!

After driving about 10 miles south of the phone booth site we came over a hill and there was a space ship right by the side of the trail. However, upon closer examination, it was discovered that the "spaceship" was an EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory Station that was funded by the National Science Foundation and conducted in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA. The unit was installed by UNAVCO.

 The EarthScope is part of a network of over 875 stations installed across western United States to study movement of the Earth's crust to within 1/8 of an inch. (I just hope that they don't find out that I accidentally knocked the EarthScope over when I was backing up -- but I put it back in the same location.) For additional information, you can visit www.pboweb.unavco.org and www.earthscope.org on the Web!

EarthScope