08/20/2026
Who remembers making sure to have a few coins in their pocket just in case you needed to use the payphone?
Did you know that the Mojave Desert had a solitary telephone booth located in a remote part of the Mojave National Preserve in California?
Located 12 miles off the nearest paved road, it was originally set up in 1948 as a hand-cranked magneto phone for local miners and homesteaders.
Later it was upgraded to a standard payphone.
In 1997 it became an early internet phenomenon after a visitor published the phone number online, people began calling it and making roads trips just to answer it. In May 2000 the National Park Service had Pacific Bell remove the phone and telephone booth due to heavy traffic damaging the protected wilderness area. Today the original phone number lives on as a digital conference / chat line managed by a community member.
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