Did you know there was once a lone phone booth in the middle of the Mojave Desert, located over 15 miles from any highway, that became an Internet sensation? It’s phone number was 714.733.9969 and its official name was “Cinder Peak 2”. The phone boot was located in what is now the Mojave National Preserver in California. It was set up in the 1960’s to provide telephone service to local miners after California mandated that “policy stations” be set up around the state to service isolated residents. The original rotary phone was replaced with a touch-tone phone in the 1970’s. Then everyone forgot about it.
A Los Angeles man spotted the phone symbol on a map of the desert and decided to find out if there really was a phone booth in the middle of the desert. Surprised at his find, he wrote about his discovery in a letter to a local underground magazine. Soon thereafter, a geek from Arizona read about the odd phone booth in the magazine and created a website dedicated to the lonely phone booth. More publicity followed and it became an online Internet sensation by the late 1990’s. Fans began calling the phone hoping to get an answer and vacationing geeks drove out of their way to get a look at it, some camping for days by the phone booth. In 1999 a Los Angeles Times reporter described meeting a man at the booth who claimed the Holy Spirit had instructed him to answer the phone. The man spent 32 days there, answering more than 500 phone calls including repeated calls from someone who identified himself as “Sergeant Zeno from the Pentagon”. By the early 2000’s, the desolate phone was ringing dozens of time each day.
Despite its now extensive use, Pacific Bell removed the phone on May 17, 2007 at the request of the National Park Service who was concerned about environmental damage from all the traffic running to and from the phone booth. A monument was erected in its place but soon thereafter the National Park Service removed the monument too. The story inspired the creation of an independent short film, Dead Line, and a full-length motion picture, Mojave Phone Booth.
