Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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Mary Gassaway was born in the tiny village of Elizabethtown, Illinois by the Ohio River on September 15, 1915 to Oscar and Mary Weaver. She had three siblings -- Sarah, Harold and Albert. Her father, Oscar, was a commercial fisherman and a Pentecostal preacher who caught catfish and bass with seine nets, and the family lived on a houseboat on the river. When Mary was about 12 years old, the family moved to Van Buren, Missouri, located by the Current River, and when he wasn't working, her father...
For most people, the initials "PJ" are an abbreviation for pajamas, but for those involved with natural resources in the West, PJ is shorthand for Pinyon Juniper Woodland, one of the most widespread plant communities across a swath of the American Southwest. Pinyon Juniper Woodland covers an estimated one quarter of all of New Mexico, and is also found in extensively in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and parts of California. In our area, Pinyon Juniper Woodland is found in much of Sand Canyon,...
I was born in Tehachapi on November 7, 1938 to Pedro and Hillaria Hernandez. I was one of nine children who lived to adulthood, two of my siblings died as children. My Dad had first come to Tehachapi in 1917 to work at the cement plant, then he went back to Mexico to bring his wife and baby son Armando back to live with him in the Monolith in the early 1920s. When I was about four years old, the family moved from the Monolith townsite into Tehachapi. Growing up in Tehachapi, I roamed the area...
One of the most common raptors in the Tehachapi Mountains is a small falcon that is only a slightly bigger than a cockatiel, but it has sharp talons like curved ice picks, a hooked bill and a fierce little dark-eyed stare: the American Kestrel. American Kestrels (Falco sparverius) are North America's smallest falcon, and also the most widespread one. These little raptors are primarily birds of open areas, and they can commonly be seen perching on power poles or the crossarms at the top of...
Beginning in 2010, a Tehachapi resident named Eugen "Gene" Kuntsman began a retirement job which consisted of living all summer at 10,000 feet in the High Sierra, cooking for the famed Rock Creek Pack Station. In 2014, he described the pack station life: "This legacy business keeps 80 to 110 horses and mules in service during the May through September pack season, with the help of about 25 employees. I regularly cook for a score of wranglers and guides as well as paying guests. Sometimes I...
A small group of interested locals hiked to a canyon on Bear Mountain recently to visit a rock art site whose location had been lost in the fog of time. Among the hikers was Fred Fickert, 75, who first discovered the artwork almost 60 years ago, when he was a 16-year-old on horseback gathering cattle on his family's ranch, which later became Bear Valley Springs. Back in 1966, all of Bear Valley and most of Bear Mountain were owned by the Fickert clan. The family first moved to Bear Valley in...
Ernest Twisselmann was a rancher and the author of A Flora of Kern County, the definitive book of the 1,875 various species and subspecies of plants that he found growing in sprawling Kern County. He began collecting plant specimens in the Temblor Range at the western border of the county in 1952, and finished fieldwork in 1966. His book was published in 1967, when the Fickert family still owned Bear Valley. He was an amazing and inspiring man. Here are some excerpts from his book, which stands...
High up in the White Mountains, about 200 miles northeast of Tehachapi, there is a place unlike any other in the world. It is the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, and some of the living trees there are more than 4,000 years old. This surreal place is part of the Inyo National Forest, and is home to the oldest living trees in the world, the Great Basin Bristlecone Pines (Pinus longaeva). California is the most conifer-rich place on Earth, with 52 different species of cone-bearing trees,...
Highline, a legacy Tehachapi rock band, will be performing at the Oak Branch Saloon inside Oak Tree Country Club in Bear Valley Springs on Friday, July 22, from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. There is no cover charge. Highline, a band started more than 20 years ago, was named for the landmark road that runs like a ribbon along the higher south side of Tehachapi Valley. They have performed as a Tom Petty tribute band and specializes in rock 'n roll acts like Petty, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, Concrete...
We only hear from the world about two or three times a month because our camp is always off far from the ranch. We start in the Owens Valley and work our way down to Tehachapi, where the Angora goats are sheared. Fred (an old ranch hand) comes to it only to bring eatables and to move the camp to another canyon when the feed is all gone. I went to work the first of September and haven't done anything yet except run around over the mountains and have a good time in general, though it is rather...
If you're looking for an interesting day excursion from Tehachapi, I suggest you consider taking the Metrolink train from Lancaster into Downtown Los Angeles and back. I've done this before, and it makes a fun and memorable trip. I first took this trip back in 2013 with members of two different Tehachapi train organizations: the Tehachapi Loop Railroad Club and the Friends of the Tehachapi Depot. We toured the vintage Union Station, as well as visited to Grand Central Market – the city's l...
"In early 1985, I got a job with Star Electric putting up Bonus turbines at the Arbutus wind park. Zond Energy Systems and other companies were thriving at that time, and I decided that I was going to get a job in the windmills because I liked them. I applied and got a job as an $8 an hour laborer. I was only there for three months but it gave me a start in wind. It was snowing at that time of year, so I was mostly cleaning snow out of ditches so they could see the cables. They let the laborers...
Our Fourth of July celebrations are a uniquely American tradition, commemorating the issuing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. This transformative document, announcing to the world that the American colonies had officially broken free of England, changed the course of human history, and its signing has been marked by festivities ever since. While the Declaration of Independence is dated July 4, 1776, it was voted on and approved by congress on July 2, so some people, including John...
Now that summer is upon us, snakes are once again stirring in the Tehachapi Mountains, as warmer temperatures have awakened them from their wintertime slumber. I have seen a Coachwhip, several California Kingsnakes and a Great Basin Gophersnake. The rattlesnakes too have become active, even though it has been a fairly cool spring. How active? Well, the Snake Guys, a group from Bear Valley Springs that was started more than 15 years ago by Ron Hayton, have already removed 59 Northern Pacific...
"My Momma loved a recipe. My favorite recipes in her collection are from the neighbors who lived up and down Cherry Lane in Tehachapi when I was a child growing up there in the 1940s and 50s. Cherry Lane was a dirt road then and my Momma dug a substantial ditch across it to slow down cars that sped by our home. When the offenders had their eyes opened by hitting the ditch and complained to Momma, she informed them, "It is a drainage ditch necessary to drain rain water off of Cherry Lane." Her...
Among the most beautiful and eye-catching native wildflowers in the Tehachapi Mountains are members of the Castilleja genus, many of them known by a more familiar common name: Indian Paintbrush. These tend to be upright, feathery flowers in various shades of red, though some are yellow and others appear purple. Castilleja, pronounced "cass-till-LAY-hah," is a confusing genus of plants, partly because botanists are not in agreement about which members are full species, which are subspecies, etc....
High quality, great tasting fruit grows on trees today in the Tehachapi area, and has since some of the first homesteaders put trees in their own gardens beginning in the 1860s. The earliest commercial orchards were planted a decade or two later. A man named Moses Hale planted an apple orchard here in 1880, and another named Joseph Kiser planted an apple orchard in upper Brite Valley in the 1870s, and sold some of the apples they produced to Southern Pacific Railroad, which apparently supplied t...
Since this is The Loop's Mother's Day issue, I decided that I would honor an amazing lady who was a devoted mother and raised her own two children here in Tehachapi, but she also provided motherly support and was a role model to countless other local kids. Her name was Joan Johnson. Joan (pronounced jo-anne) was married for 67 years to Tehachapi boy Dick Johnson, whose father Walter published the Tehachapi News for many years. Joan helped at the family business for decades, since Walter later...
When Ed Grimes first came to live in Tehachapi in 1950, the odds in life were heavily stacked against him: he was a seven year-old, half Latino boy whose father had abandoned him and his brother Jerry, and he had been bounced around in eight different foster homes after his mother, Helen Arvizu, contracted tuberculosis and was confined to the Stoneybrook Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Keene for two years until her death. It would have been difficult to imagine that this hard luck lad would one day...
Now that spring has arrived in the Tehachapi Mountains, we will start seeing babies of all different kinds of animals: rabbits, squirrels, songbirds, raptors, reptiles and amphibians, as well as livestock like cattle, sheep and goats. Spring is known as the season for renewal and rebirth, and it's also the season for birth. It makes sense for animals to synchronize the arrival of their young with the onset of spring: lots of fresh green plant growth means food is more available and easier to...
Would you like to make your garden or yard more interesting and colorful? Then I highly recommend planting flowers that will attract an assortment of pollinators. Not only are the blossoms themselves beautiful to look at and often fragrant, but the activity of insects can be enthralling as you watch an assortment of butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, bees and other creatures forage among your flowers. Pollinator plants often grow well in planters or raised gardens, so they are well-suited to...
Terry Edwards was the definition of a superfan. He was the undisputed "Warrior of the Century." This devoted Tehachapi High School athletics fan attended 413 Warrior football games in a row – he didn't missed a single game in more than 30 years, ever since he went to a contest against the Bishop Broncos on Halloween, 1980. That included every single away game as well as home games. On two separate occasions when he was visiting his daughter Rocki, in Seattle, he drove home to Tehachapi, w...
This is the time of year when it looks like tiny lily pads have suddenly appeared in shady spots near the base of trees, or below moss-dappled boulders half submerged in the surrounding soil, and along gentle slopes and beside meandering shaded footpaths. These welcome clusters of round leaves with miniature white flowers in the center are the unmistakable sign of Miner's Lettuce. This pleasant annual is a California native that does best in wet years, but still manages to make at least a cameo...
My family first came to the Tehachapi area in the early in 1930s, when my maternal grandparents Fred and Daisy Fisher left behind the Dustbowl in Oklahoma and came to California to better their lives. Fred went to work in Tehachapi for the Sasia ranching family, and also dry-farmed barley at the Fickert Ranch in Bear Valley. The Fishers lived just off Giraudo Road in Cummings Valley in an old house that was built in the late 1800s. If you dropped a marble on the floor of my grandparents' house,...
Spring wildflowers in the Tehachapi Mountains are abundant during wet years, and scarce during dry years. Since California and the West in general have been in such a period of prolonged drought, it seems that we've had more misses than hits lately when it comes spring flowers. But there is at least a modest bloom along the western Tehachapi foothills. If you've driven to Bakersfield lately, you may have noticed some California Poppies blooming on hillsides and sandy washes in the vicinity of...
