Lightbox Wednesday #36

I've been cleaning up my archives of images taken over the past 7 years, saving some, deleting many. Every Wednesday, I post interesting images I've revisited over the past week.

Coastal wireless station KPH at Pt. Reyes is one of my favorite spots to visit and photograph. It's quiet, desolate and lonely out there. A perfect break from my noisy, always connected work life.

KPH, first a Marconi Wireless property and later owned by RCA, was once the main radio relay point between ships in the Pacific and the mainland. The National Parks Service owns the property now and a dedicated team of volunteers maintain the station and its aging transmitters and antenna fields.

KPH was a high power Morse code only facility. The receive and transmitter sites are located some miles apart to reduce interference. The receive site is at Pt. Reyes and the transmitters are south in Bolinas.

Feed lines out to the HF antennas at the receive site.

The place really lends itself to black and white film photography. I shot these with my Leica M2 on Acros film.

The transmitter building at the KPH site in Bolinas

There is an abandoned phone booth in the parking lot of KPH. Wireless telegraphy and public phones; two communication forms from a bygone era.