Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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"I began collecting insects when I was only seven or eight years old. My parents were very indulgent of my interest in bugs. Once when we had company, a woman was performing a piano recital when a large hornworm that I had caught crawled slowly across the top of the piano as she played. Fortunately, she didn't see it." – Ed Sampson Ed Sampson was an entomologist and the owner of the Mourning Cloak Ranch on Old Town Road, and approximately 5,000 different species are represented in his vast i...
The Tehachapi Mountains can be a challenging place to garden. Many of the plants carried in chain stores or purchased out of town and brought to Tehachapi don't thrive here. California native plants tend to have a much better success rate, and you can get some of them locally at an upcoming plant sale held in conjunction with Earth Day on April 22. The Tehachapi Resource Conservation District is announcing the return of their annual Native Plant Sale for 2023. A variety of California...
Roses generally do well in Tehachapi, and my recommendation for one of the best miniature roses you can raise here is the adorable Rainbow's End. This little rose is noteworthy because its yellow blossoms are tinged with red, then as the flowers mature, they turn a darker orangish red. The hotter it gets, the redder the blossoms turn as they age. At any given time, different flowers on the same rose bush will be at various stages, so there will be different colored roses on same plant. This...
I'd like to tell you about the beautiful pear orchard that once grew within Tehachapi city limits, not far from the downtown area. It was orderly and well-maintained, and when that forest of trees were cloaked in snowy blossoms each spring, it was like an inland sea of white flowers. But first, let's talk about pear trees in general. . . Pear trees are amazingly long lived. Governor Peter Stuyvesant brought a young rooted pear tree with him from Holland in 1647 when he arrived to become the dire...
"We spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about." – Prof. Tim Jackson...
“When people who had never heard of Tehachapi would ask where it was, I’d tell them ‘We’re about halfway between Keene and Monolith.’” – Mark “Wally” Waddell...
“A good laugh and long sleep are the two best cures for anything.” – Irish Proverb...
"The night Prohibition was enacted in 1919, there were 13 saloons and only two churches in Tehachapi, and the church people said the town had gone to hell. Now there's about two bars and 30 churches in Tehachapi, and the drinking people say the town has gone to hell." – Herbert Nelson Force Herb Force, one of the first and most dedicated historians in Tehachapi, made this observation in the 1970s....
"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason." – Edward R. Murrow...
U. S. Postal Service: "State the names of other post offices near the proposed one in Tehachapi, their directions and distances from it by the most direct roads." Answer: "There are none unless it be San Bernardino which is 100 miles and Kernville about 70 miles." – P. D. Greene This was the answer Peter Greene wrote down in 1868 when filling out an application to have a post office in the Tehachapi area – the building itself was at Oak Creek, where Oak Creek Road from Mojave joins Teh...
"When I was growing up in Tehachapi, we could hike and explore all over this place, on both sides of the mountains. We could go out and be gone for four or five days. Me and all four of my brothers were Warriors, competing on the different sports teams. I love Tehachapi, that's why I moved back here. We lived in Lancaster for 20 years while I worked at National Cement, but my wife Liz and I always figured we'd come back." – Charlie Hernandez...
Under blue Tehachapi skies, a creek chuckled and splashed as it flowed, newly-invigorated by recent rain and snow. A Northern Flicker flashed the bright orange underside of its wings as it swooped from an oak tree, and a Red-tailed Hawk circled slowly overhead, sharp eyes watching the activity below. At the ground level, hundreds of baby plants were being carefully tucked into the soil to start their lives as a future woodland. This was the scene recently as a team of volunteers was busy...
After graduating from Marine Corps boot camp in 1943, prior to being shipped to the Pacific Theater of War, the Corps sent me to the Marine Corps Air Station in Mojave, California. Being from the Midwest, I had never before seen the desert, and I liked the wide open spaces. It was winter and the blistering summer heat had been replaced by nice sunny weather most of the time, if you don't count an occasional wind of gale force. Anyway, I liked it. From the base one could see the snow on the...
The Tehachapi Mountains are home to at least six species of tree oaks and perhaps that many shrubs oaks as well. Oaks are one of the defining characteristics of many local landscapes. The biggest of these are Valley Oaks, which can grow into massive, living sculptures with pale, deeply furrowed bark, a rugged framework of craggy, angular limbs and a spreading canopy of green lobed leaves. The fate of our largest native oak trees, the Valley Oaks (Quercus lobata), can be compared to that of the...
January weather in Tehachapi can be snowy, windy and extremely cold, or it can be sunny and mild with temperatures in the 60s. Some of the strongest (and at times competing) influences on Tehachapi weather are these two realities: one is that we are in the mountains at 4,000 feet above sea level, which brings rapidly changeable weather, low temperatures and occasional snow; the second is that despite our elevation we are still in Southern California, albeit on the northern edge, which brings...
Since the Tehachapi Mountains can get very cold in winter, and we usually have snow, you may wonder if any creatures in our area hibernate to avoid the coldest months. Let's look at how local animals cope with the cold. Black Bears are well-known for hibernating, at least in areas with severe winters, but the picture is more complicated in an area with mixed or open winters like Tehachapi. The term "open winter" refers to areas that get snow and cold, but may also have much warmer periods...
When most people think about Tehachapi and fruit trees, the first type that comes to mind are apple trees. This is appropriate, since fine quality apples have been grown in the Tehachapi Mountains since some of the first settlers planted apples here in the 1850s and 1860s, but honestly there are easier choices for home gardeners. Apples are vulnerable to an insect pest known as the coddling moth (the worm in the apple), and you usually have to do something to control them -- commercial...
If you want to learn more about the Native Americans of the Tehachapi Mountains, the first two things to do are this: visit the Tehachapi Museum, and also pick up a book called Handbook of the Kawaiisu. This unique book was a life accomplishment of a remarkable Nuwä elder named Harold Williams. Harold was a leading tribal member of the Nuwä, the Tehachapi Indian people, and he realized a longtime dream with the 2009 publication of Handbook of the Kawaiisu, a book he co-authored with a...
A friend of mine, Manney Cowan, grew up here and lived in Tehachapi, and people used to pay him to live-trap nuisance animals from their yards and relocate them to remote areas. He'd trap raccoons that were peeling up sod looking for worms and other invertebrates to eat, or catching the fish out of people's ponds, or skunks that were under structures, that kind of thing. One time he was catching skunks (there's seldom only one) that were living under a shed in Bear Valley Springs. I went with...
Sierra Nevada Natural History By Tracy I. Storer and Robert Usinger 1963 University of California Press ISBN # 0-520-01226-7 While not specifically about the Tehachapi Mountains, this field guide documents the plants, animals, physical features and much more of the adjacent Sierra Nevada Range, so much of it is applicable to our area. With some photos and line drawings and hundreds of brief descriptions, it is a very useful and well-written guide to the natural world. Desert Country By Bob...
If you drive east out of Tehachapi on Highway 58, then head north on Highway 14, the very first waystation or pit stop of any kind that you'll encounter will be one you won't forget: the Jawbone Canyon Store, a Kern County original for 60 years. This little desert oasis has offered a variety of supplies and a good sense of humor since the gas station first opened on July 28, 1963. For many years it was owned by Richard "Bonk" McKendry, a colorful character who was once married to the famed...
One of the ways that I know California has been locked in an ongoing drought is that fact that I often dream about a winter and spring that are green and lush and verdant. It can seem hard to imagine now, but there are years when the Tehachapi Mountains are home to lots of seasonal creeks that are flowing with water, beautiful water. . . . The year 2011 was one of those years, when the rains and snows kept coming, recharging reservoirs, springs and aquifers. It seems so long ago now, but I remem...
Venture into the higher elevations in the Tehachapi Mountains, about 5,000 feet and higher, and you will eventually encounter one of our most common conifers: the White Fir. These handsome trees have beautiful green foliage, a dense symmetrical appearance and a delicious, apple/citrusy aroma. They smell just like Christmas trees, because they are Christmas trees – the tree species that Santa most often leaves the gifts around are White Fir, Noble Fir, Douglas Fir and other members of the f...
"Cho'ikizh! Cho'ikizh!" The Nuwä Indian woman heard the familiar call as she sat under a hava kahni (shade house), a square, open-sided shelter made of willow poles and topped with a thatching of leafy willow branches. As she sat in the welcome shade on a warm summer morning, weaving a basket with her skillful fingers, the piya (mother) again heard the sound: "Cho'ikizh! Cho'ikizh!" (cho-EEK-izh). This was not a human calling out, it was a Western Scrub Jay, making one of the raucous calls for...
Virginia Gonzalez Sanchez was born at home on F Street in Tehachapi on June 23, 1931, the daughter of Lupe Cortez and Augustin Gonzalez, and was brought into the world by her grandmother, Benito's wife Cipriana Cortez. Virginia's family has deep roots in California, since her ancestors lived here before California was a state, or was even part of the U.S. -- they were originally Californios when the territory was still part of Mexico, prior to 1848. Her grandfather Benito Cortez came to the...
