One Photograph: The Cypress Tree Tunnel

At California’s Point Reyes National Seashore, I am not sure which attraction is more popular, the Point Reyes Lighthouse or the Cypress Tree Tunnel. Whenever I have visited, there are crowds at both. Google “Cypress Tree Tunnel” and you’ll find many photographs taken in this very spot. I made this image with my Leica M2 and 50mm rigid Summicron.

It feels very lonely and desolate along Sir Frances Drake Boulevard as you slowly make your way from the Point Reyes National Seashore visitors center on patched asphalt to the lighthouse. And it makes sense that your eye is drawn to the long row of Monterey Cypress trees growing along both sides of a narrow driveway about halfway out to the coast. These trees stand in stark contrast to land sculpted mostly by the wind.

Planted around 1930 by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), these trees framed the grand entrance to the KPH Maritime Receiving Station. At the end of the long tree tunnel, sits an Art Deco-style building that houses the radio receivers of once mighty coastal radio station KPH, manned 24 hours a day for most of the 20th century, monitoring incoming radio messages from ships at sea. A similar building, 20 miles south near the town of Bolinas, contained the transmitters. Operators at the receiving site could remotely key the transmitters over phone lines that connect the two buildings. KPH was once a powerful and critical link providing Morse code and radio teletype ship to shore messages until satellite communication became technically and commercially viable.

KPH made its last ever Morse transmission on July 12, 1999. Many similar stations up and down both US coasts had their equipment scrapped and buildings and antennas razed. At KPH however, operators finished their last day, locked the doors and left. Since the KPH facilities were on National Park Service land, the facilities were simply abandoned until two radio “true believers” Richard Dillman and Tom Horsfall, decided to visit the transmit and receive sites two years after they were shut down. Instead of the vandalized sites they expected to see, what they found were radio time capsules with equipment intact. In fact, at the Cypress Tree Tunnel facility, the radio receivers were still on, monitoring the ship-to-shore Morse channels. Dillman and Horsfall started the Maritime Radio Historical Society and convinced the National Park Service to allow them to begin restoration of the KPH facilities with the goal of returning KPH to the air—a functioning memorial to the history of maritime communications.

Through their hard work and dedication, along with many volunteers and donations, Dillman and Horsfall brought 1950s vintage RCA transmitters back online, some that sat abandoned for more than 10 years in the salt air and slowly and patiently restored both the receive and transmit facilities, including acres of antenna fields. Today, KPH and amateur radio station K6KPH are on the air each Saturday. Check their website for more information. Maritime Historical Radio Society.