Mojave phone booth

The Mojave phone booth was a lone telephone booth in what is now the Mojave National Preserve in California. It attracted online attention in 1997 for its unusual location – it was located at the intersection of two dirt roads in a remote part of the Mojave Desert, from the nearest paved road (Interstate 15 to the northeast, Kelbaker Road to the southwest) and miles from any buildings. History The phone booth was originally set up in 1948 to provide telephone service to local volcanic cinder miners and others living in the area, at the request of Emerson Ray, who owned the Cima Cinder Mine nearby. It was assigned the name Cinder Peak Policy Station, part of a network of "policy stations" placed by mandate of the California government to serve residents of isolated parts of the state. The Mojave phone booth probably replaced an earlier booth to the south. The original hand-cranked magneto phone was replaced with a payphone in the 1960s. The rotary phone was then replaced with a touch-tone model in the 1970s. The booth phone's original number was BAker-3-9969. After area codes were established in 1947, it shared the same area code as all of Southern California, 213. In 1951, the area code 714 was split off from 213, and 714 was the booth's area code until 1982 when parts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties were given the area code 619. The booth's area code for its final few years of existence was 760. In 1997, a Los Angeles man spotted a telephone icon on a map of the Mojave Desert and decided to visit it. He wrote a letter about his adventure to an underground magazine and included the booth's telephone number. An Arizona man, Godfrey Daniels, read the letter and started a website devoted to the Mojave telephone booth. The booth became an Internet sensation after it was mentioned in a New York Times article. Soon other people began calling the booth, others made websites about it, and a few even took trips to the booth to answer, often camping out at the site. Several callers kept recordings of their conversations. Over time, the booth became covered in graffiti left by visitors.