The phone booth installed in 1948 in a remote location in the Mojave Desert

The Mojave Desert, in the interior of California and in the western United States, is and has been home to things that seem illogical.

The strange case of a beacon in the middle of a desert and more than 160 km from the coast
A mysterious road stretching almost 80 km across the Mojave Desert in a straight line

Three years ago we saw the lighthouse located in the middle of that desert and more than 160 km from the coast, where its light cannot alert any ship. A month ago we also saw here the mysterious straight road of almost 80 km that crosses that desert, but there is an even more famous case: a telephone booth installed in 1948 and renovated in the 1960s in the middle of the desert, intended for the miners of a volcanic ash mine. Its installation was due to the fact that California laws required telephone companies to provide service to isolated locations even if the lines to those places were not profitable.

For decades, most of the world was unaware of the existence of this phone booth, until the internet arrived. In the second half of the 1990s, this booth became famous thanks to a website created by Godfrey Daniels, a Nevada resident who published a book about it. Worldwide fame came with a news article published in May 1998 by The New York Times. Finally, the lonely phone booth began receiving calls from different parts of the world, occasionally answered by a miner, and became a pilgrimage site for a wide variety of people.

The ever-increasing influx of people to the site began to pose a problem, as the phone booth was located in a protected area, and the area was deteriorating due to the influx of tourists. In May 1997, Pacific Bell dismantled the phone booth after receiving a request from the National Park Service, which manages the Mojave National Preserve, established in 1994. Along with the booth, the telephone line poles were also removed, perhaps in an attempt to prevent the continued pilgrimage of curious onlookers to the site.

That phone booth was featured on several websites, in books, comic strips, and even an independent film, directed by actor and filmmaker John Putch and released in 2006. Some fans of the booth even put up a headstone, which was also removed.

One ​​of the websites dedicated to that booth noted: "The Mojave Phone Booth staked its final claim to fame when it became the first (and probably only) Internet meme ever to be targeted for destruction by the United States Government."

A few days ago, Sidetrack Adventures dedicated an interesting video to visiting the site where the phone booth was located and its surroundings, including the (now abandoned) volcanic ash quarry that motivated the installation of a telephone terminal in such a remote location in the middle of a desert:

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Main image: deuceofclubs.com. A computer-generated recreation of what the Mojave phone booth looked like.