Cypress Tree Tunnel and Coast Station KPH

The trees were landscaping. Around 1930 the Radio Corporation of America lined the drive to its new receiving station with Monterey cypress, one of the few trees that will grow in the wind off Point Reyes Beach, and over ninety-odd years they closed over the road into the tunnel people now drive out to photograph.

At the end stands the reason for them: a white Art Deco station built between 1929 and 1931 to replace Marconi's 1914 receiving station at Marshall, on Tomales Bay. Working with transmitters across the peninsula near Bolinas, it handled ship-to-shore traffic for most of the twentieth century, and it has carried the call sign KPH since 1946. Coastal Morse stations once ran the length of both American coasts; one by one they shut down, and the Point Reyes stations were decommissioned in 1999.

They did not go quiet. Volunteers of the Maritime Radio Historical Society restored the receivers, transmitters and teletypes, some of it World War II-era equipment, and still put KPH on the air. Every July 12 they hold the Night of Nights, marking the end of commercial Morse operations in the United States. The building is the seashore's North District Operations Center, and the volunteers open the station for tours on most Saturday afternoons.