Scientists will tell you that Amboy Crater, a volcanic cinder cone out in the Mojave Desert, has been dormant for maybe 10,000 years, but that doesn’t take into consideration its 1959 eruption that was seen all over the world.
That’s when the 250-foot-high volcano played an important, though uncredited, role in the motion picture, “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” starring Pat Boone, James Mason, Arlene Dahl and Diane Baker.
For a few hot days in June 1959, the cast assembled near Amboy where the cinder cone was called upon to display its cinematic versatility. In the movie, the crater’s silhouette is first portrayed as a hazy Iceland volcanic cone where the journey to the Earth’s center begins. At the end of the film, as the Italian volcano “Stromboli,” it explodes in an ocean scene in which all the stars are rescued.
The film loosely followed the Jules Verne novel in which a scientist and four others, plus a duck, enter an Iceland cave in a volcano. They march down a passage for many weeks in search of the original Middle Earth.
In the film, they do reach the center – it’s inexplicably an ocean with a whirlpool rather than the planet’s actual core. They also discover Atlantis and a lot of huge hungry lizards, subdue a bad guy who followed them, and finally create an explosion that hurdled them out of Stromboli to land safely in the Mediterranean.
And that Stromboli “eruption” apparently did happen, but at Amboy, according to a Sun newspaper account of July 1, 1969.
“The moviemakers turned time eons backward and returned Amboy Crater, an extinct volcano, to its former fiery glories,” said the article about the crater as Stromboli. “With the aid of tons of old tires and several thousand gallons of fuel oil, Amboy Crater ‘erupted.’ ”
San Bernardino County sheriff’s Deputy Charles E. Jones alerted law enforcement and firefighting agencies that the scheduled eruption was just so much showbiz. The film crew spent several days at Amboy. Some of the movie was filmed at Carlsbad Caverns.
The most sensational part of the 20th Century Fox film — though elsewhere in a Hollywood sound stage — was Pat Boone’s first cinematic kiss, with Diane Baker. The kiss, which Boone later said he wasn’t happy to do, attracted plenty of fan attention while breaking the hearts of so many teen girls.
Neither the kiss nor two Boone songs were in Verne’s novel, nor was another unexpected character during the filming – a lion. And, no, this was no MGM production.
News of such an odd entry came from my friends Jaylyn and John Earl who write interesting online features about the Southwest deserts called “The Desert Way.” Just recently, they wrote about a circus lion that reportedly got loose in the Mojave after a truck broke down in 1959.
The story circulated that an Amboy resident actually saw the lion about a month before the filming began. This desert Bigfoot got lots of publicity world-wide but was never captured — if it was ever there in the first place. But apparently fears of a lion loose out among the creosote bushes certainly shook up the studio officials and cast (and perhaps became another way to publicize the film).
“It turned a Hollywood movie troupe there into a virtual armed camp,” wrote the Sun. “After reading reports of the ‘lion sightings,’ publicity-wise film officials ordered firearms and ammunition passed out to the members of the troupe to protect them” and also hired bodyguards.
(Take a look at the Earls’ interesting tale of the wayward lion of the Mojave. It is at www.thedesertway.com)
And I would be remiss if I didn’t also report about yet another eruption of sorts at Amboy Crater happening several years after the movie people cleared out.
I learned of a blog by geologist Dan McShane from 2011 that told of an incident when Route 66 was still the main highway across the Mojave. Sometime around 1971, Amboy Crater actually did explode again, in a manner of speaking.
McShane wrote that young people living in Amboy and the vicinity collected a bunch of old tires scattered throughout the desert and set them on fire in the crater. I assume it was an attempt to scare Amboy and visitors on the highway and the adjacent railroad of an apparent eruption. It was not an especially environmentally friendly activity, but more than 50 years ago I guess there just wasn’t much recreation for the area’s young people.
Fortunately, the crater today is under the protection of the Bureau of Land Management which has built a road and parking lot for hikers to take the 3-mile round trip to the crater’s rim. The hike takes latter-day Pat Boones or James Masons up a somewhat rough trail to peer into the crater where so much fire and brimstone – natural and man-made – once happened. And, while on the trail, hikers might want to keep an eye out for any large cats lurking amid the lava beds.
The film itself received three Oscar nominations, mostly for production, but nothing involving Amboy’s portrayal. However, in 1973 the crater did get a bit of recognition when the federal government designated it as Amboy Crater National Natural Landmark.
Casa Primera tour
Tours of Casa Primera, the original Pomona home of the pioneer Palomares family, will be held in the afternoon of April 27 by the Historical Society of the Pomona Valley.
Information about the tours, costing $5, as well as how to make reservations are available at www.pomonahistorical.org
Joe Blackstock writes on Inland Empire history. He can be reached at joe.blackstock@gmail.com or Twitter @JoeBlackstock. Check out some of our columns of the past at Inland Empire Stories on Facebook at www.facebook.com/IEHistory.
