Tehachapi Pass and Mojave Desert

This past week we left the Central Coast region of California to spend a couple of days in southern California. The chief reason for our going down south is because we wanted to visit my wife's mother who lives in Redlands California. 

We did not take the more direct route, which was down the coastal highway but we traveled inland before heading south. There were two places that I wanted to see on the way down to southern California. I wanted to visit the Tehachapi Pass and see what the Mojave desert looks like.

I went to the Tehachapi pass not only to see the beautiful Sierra Nevada Mountains  around Tehachapi, but also because the Tehachapi Pass is one of the windiest areas in the world.  I was reading on the Internet that the winds through the pass average 14 to 20 miles per hour. It is the home of  one of the largest wind farms in our country. The entire state of California has 16,000 wind  turbines, with 5,000 of them being in Tehachapi. The turbines went up in the early 1980's and literally cover some hillsides.  If you go into Google Earth, you can see just how many wind turbines are in this area (35º 05' 17.55" N  118º 16' 52.78" W).

We drove down from the Sierra Nevada mountains after leaving Tehachapi  and found ourselves driving through the Mojave desert. I have never been to a desert before and in my mind I was expecting it to look something like pictures I had seen of the Sahara, just miles and miles of sand. But it does not look like that at all. It is a large relatively  flat basin. The website for the Mojave desert says that it is 25,000 square miles. It  was not just miles of sand dunes, it does seem rather dry, but there is vegetation, at least in the areas that we traveled through. We saw various brush growth and Joshua Trees all along the route.

Two other places in the Mojave desert that were passed were Edwards Air Force Base and Boron.  Edwards Air Force is important as it is one of the designated landing sites in the country for the space shuttle, as a matter of fact the Columbia, the first shuttle to be launched landed at Edwards Air Force base in 1981.

Now you may ask,what about Boron California, well in 1925  a large deposit of boron was found in the hills around Boron. This is the primary cleaning agent used in Borax, the well known 20 Mule Team Borax powdered hand soap.