Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
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Wet, bountiful winters like we've just experienced benefit the irruptive wildflowers that bloom in profusion, like annual California Poppies, Hillside Daisies, Goldfields, Popcorn Flowers, and more. But generous water deliveries in the form of rain and snow are also helpful to perennials, of course – those hardy plants that persist year after year through freezing winters and long dry summers. One of the most beautiful and interesting of these perennials found in the Tehachapi Mountains is not a...
C. Hart Merriam was an amazing naturalist and anthropologist of the late 1800s and early 1900s. He came through Tehachapi in 1905 because he was interested in the flora, fauna and Native culture. He kept careful notebooks of his observations, and these are some excerpts that focus on wildlife he saw in the Tehachapi Mountains. Merriam recorded these observations: "In Tehachapi Valley saw many Ravens everywhere, some meadowlarks, 2 Says Phoebe, 2 Northern Shrike, several Mountain Bluebirds & 1...
If you visit the Tehachapi Depot Museum, you will encounter references to "the Stokoe Collection" and to Bill Stokoe, the man who gathered much of the assorted railroad memorabilia that is on display there. The late Bill Stokoe was, in a sense, the father of the depot museum. He was also a cherished friend of mine, and I'd like to tell you more about him and his remarkable life. Bill was a longtime signal maintainer for Southern Pacific Railroad and a lifelong railroad man. He installed 15...
"Quieten'it down in the back of the bus! If you don't behave, I'll stop this bus right here and put you off, and you can find your way home the best way you know how." – Betty Matthews Betty was a bus driver and later transportation supervisor for the Tehachapi Unified School District who used this threat to get rowdy boys to behave. She never actually removed a student mid-route....
"Novice falconers are only allowed to catch a Red-tailed Hawk or a Kestrel, which are the most common raptors in the Tehachapi Mountains, and the reason that they are encouraged to catch a wild bird is so that if mistakes are made in the training or if the bird escapes, it will know how to hunt for itself and will simply revert to a wild state." – Kelley Kemp...
“Who’d give a dime to see a piss ant eat a bale of hay?” – Rodney Meter Auctioneer Rod of Lancaster Sales Yard would slip this into his patter if he couldn’t get a bid on an item....
“There is a day to cast your nets, and a day to dry your nets.” – Traditional Fisherman’s Saying...
“No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” – David O. McKay...
“Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick any two.” – Sign on a desk This sentiment indicates that a customer can get their job done good and fast, but it won’t be cheap; fast and cheap but it won’t be good; or good and cheap but it won’t be fast....
“Tootie would go with her mother and brothers to stay with her Dad, who worked as a miner in Randsburg. I lived in Tehachapi and didn’t have a car, so I’d walk to Randsburg to see her.” – Hooks Anderson Hooks started dating his wife, Tootie, when he was 17 and she was 15. It’s 60 miles to drive from Tehachapi to Randsburg, slightly shorter as the raven flies or the lovesick teenage boy walks. Hooks and Tootie were married for more than 65 years....
"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...
