Golden State’s toughest mountains — Tehachapis
Don’t mess with the Tehachapis. California has taller mountain ranges, more famous mountain ranges, more beautiful mountain ranges. But no mountains here are tougher — or more important — than the Tehachapis.
A mishmash of midsize peaks extending 40 miles across southern Kern County and north Los Angeles County, the Tehachapis effectively form the wall that defines our state. This is their paradox: The Tehachapis at once separate and connect California’s regions — north and south, valley and desert, Sierra Nevada and coastal range.
As a barrier, the Tehachapis — the name is often attributed to the Kawaiisu word tihachipia, or “hard climb” — boast an undefeated record. They have been penetrated — by Interstate 5, aqueducts and power transmission lines — but they have never been conquered.
Recently, the Tehachapis emerged at the center of the big California debate over high-speed rail. Plans to build the project first from the Central Valley to Southern California have survived lawsuits, bipartisan political opposition and waning public support. But last month, spooked by the financial and engineering challenges of tunneling through rock and earthquake faults in the Tehachapis (and the San Gabriels), the high-speed rail authority said it might make a U-turn, and connect the Central Valley to the Bay Area first.
Of course, the high-speed-rail builders would hardly be the first people to lose their nerve at the prospect of crossing the mountain range. Is there any more fear-inducing drive in our state than traversing the Tehachapis on that scarily steep and windy stretch of I-5 known as the Grapevine?
Trains still go over the mountains as slowly — less than 25 miles per hour — as they did in the 1870s. Even planes hit a little turbulence going over the mountains, because of shifting wind patterns (at least, that’s what a Southwest pilot once told me).
The Tehachapis represent Califor- nians as we really are — tough, stubborn, and shorter and wider than we look in our publicity stills. And, as staffers at the Tejon Ranch Conservancy recently explained to me, the Tehachapis are the most Californian of mountains: the only place in the state where four varied regions converge — the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, the coastal range and the San Joaquin Valley. As a result, the Tehachapis offer an incredible diversity of plants: desert scrub and Joshua trees next to Sierra Nevada forest, or coastal chaparral near valley grasslands.
The Tehachapis, so little known despite their importance, used to loom larger in the public imagination. Read newspapers from 19th century California, when most of the state’s population was in the north and crossing the Tehachapis was a life-threatening undertaking, and you’ll find Southern California routinely described as “South of the Tehachapis” in the tone one might speak of a renegade province or an uncivilized hinterland.
But in the 20th century, California tilted south, and the Tehachapis became less prominent, serving mainly as a wall to prevent Southern California from sprawling too far north. Another reason the Tehachapis were not talked about as much: Unlike other mountain ranges in the state, they are mostly privately owned (for ranches), and not so easily explored by California’s nature seekers.
That is beginning to change. The last decade has brought the promise of a new era to the Tehachapis — and that involves more than just the highly publicized restoration of a California condor population in the Tehachapi region after near extinction.
The Tejon Ranch, a 422-square-mile property in the Tehachapis, has pursued development on some of its property (perhaps notably the Outlets at Tejon along I-5 north of the Grapevine), while also striking, in 2008, a historic agreement with environmental organizations to protect 90 percent of its land.
Now the Tejon Ranch Conservancy is working to conserve, explore and provide public access. There are wildflower viewing stations, bird watches, community hikes, school trips, naturalist classes (based on the University of California’s famous naturalist program) and citizen science projects. This spring will offer more opportunities for Californians to get to know this hard-to-know mountain range.
Private conservation efforts like Tejon don’t draw headlines like presidential declarations of new national parks or forests. But they are more representative of the future than the flashier conservation of public lands, which has become more difficult given the higher costs of land, the pressure on public budgets, and polarization around eminent domain, property rights and just about everything else in American politics.
The conservation of the Tehachapis means more Californians may connect to the range, and not merely through it. Californians will want more of both kinds of connections, and we’ll need to be careful to minimize their impacts. The Tehachapis, once again, will have to hang tough.