the mojave phonebooth: part 1, weird at first sight

I first ran across what later came to be known as the Mojave Phone Booth in Jan­u­ary of 1993 or 4. I’d been camp­ing that week­end in what was soon to become Mojave National Pre­serve, and one day was explor­ing some of the fea­tures on the north end of the park-to-be. There the park butts up against I-15 and the thriv­ing tourist waysta­tion of Baker, Cal­i­for­nia, touted on signs through­out town as “Gate­way to Death Val­ley.” Baker is home to what’s claimed as the “world’s largest ther­mome­ter,” 134 feet tall–a foot for every degree that made up the hottest tem­per­a­ture ever recorded at Bad­wa­ter in Death Val­ley. Baker is also known for the Mad Greek Restau­rant, a busy and basi­cally okay eatery that serves up Greek –Mexican-American cui­sine in por­tions that you might expect in a town that owes its suc­cess if not exis­tence to trav­el­ers head­ing for that shin­ing shrine of excess, Las Vegas, which at one point in my life was my all-time least favorite swath of soul­less human des­o­la­tion on earth. But enough Vegas-bashing and back to the Preserve…

The most dra­matic fea­tures on the land are a chain of mul­ti­col­ored vol­canic cin­der cones. I think of them as single-use vol­ca­noes: Unlike their big broth­ers that build to some size over long eras, cin­der cones mark a short period of erup­tions that builds them to a few hun­dred feet high. And then the erup­tions stop, the route to the magma below closes up, and when the ground’s finally ready to erupt again, a new crack opens up, away from the first cin­der cone, cre­at­ing another, sep­a­rate cone.

Here at the Mojave Pre­serve there are piles of them–some of them pris­tine in their per­fect pyra­mi­dal geom­e­try, oth­ers reshaped by min­ing operations–and they guard the west­ern edge of Cima Dome. Just a few miles south of the world’s largest ther­mome­ter, Cima Dome hosts the world’s dens­est pop­u­la­tion of joshua trees, and that’s what you notice first. But the fea­ture is called a dome and not a for­est, and as remark­able as the j-trees are, grow­ing denser and green as you get far­ther out on the dome, it’s the geol­ogy and not biol­ogy that makes this place so amazing.

On a topo map you can eas­ily make out the uni­form con­cen­tric rings of the dome as it rises over 1500 feet from the lower points around it. In real life it’s a lot more sub­tle. You look at the ground as it rises, grad­u­ally, per­fectly, and you get a torqued sen­sa­tion that some­thing is hap­pen­ing, but you’re not quite sure what. You stare and it looks like you see the cur­va­ture of the earth, though instead of fly­ing high over it, you’re stand­ing right on it. Space seems to dis­tort as what you expect to be flat bulges up. Queasi­ness sets in. Wel­come to Cima Dome.

Cima Dome topo


The place has this amaz­ing power and force that the touted 1960s and 1970s earth­works can’t begin to approach. In terms of spa­tial power, as inter­est­ing as they are, Robert Smithson’s Spi­ral Jetty, Michael Heizer’s var­i­ous con­struc­tions, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater can’t hold a can­dle to it. Sorry guys!

So there I was, jeep­ing through the j-trees and the spa­tial queasi­ness, when I encounter a fence, a cat­tle guard, a power line and a pow­er­line road cross­ing the jeep track. And next to the road, next to one of the power poles is a phone booth. A phone booth? A dozen miles from any­thing? A freak­ing phone booth? But out in the desert you see a lot of…unusual…things. And I stuck the phone booth as another entry in my brain’s cat­a­loging of desert sights and sight­ings. Lit­tle did I know what I’d just seen.

[ go to part 2, i told you it was weird ]

January 06 2008 11:15 am | Categories: places • rambles | Tags: • • • • • • • • •

One Response to “the mojave phonebooth: part 1, weird at first sight”

  1. the mojave phonebooth: part 2, i told you it was weird : [ Lost in the Landscape ] on 10 Jan 2008 at 7:27 am #

    […] the mojave phone­booth: part 1, weird at first sight […]

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