About Visit Kern

Visit Kern is an independent, editorially-run travel guide to Kern County, California — covering the Central Valley farm towns, the Sierra Nevada foothills around the Kern River, and the Mojave Desert side of the county. It exists because, for a county this large and this geographically varied, no comparable independent guide currently does.

Why this site exists

Kern County once had an official visitor's bureau — the Kern County Board of Trade, later operating as the county's Tourism Bureau — that published lodging and dining directories, road-condition updates, and visitor information for the county. The county Board of Supervisors voted to dissolve the Board of Trade in January 2020, and no successor government tourism office has been created since. Visit Kern is not affiliated with Kern County government, the former Board of Trade, or any other government or quasi-governmental tourism authority — it's an independent project built to fill that real gap with an accurate, currently-maintained guide.

How listings are verified

Every lodging and dining listing on this site is checked against at least one independent source — a business's own site, Yelp, Tripadvisor, or a similar listing — before it's published, and confirmed as currently operating rather than pulled from an outdated directory. Where a town genuinely has no verifiable lodging or dining option, that town's page says so honestly rather than inventing or padding a listing. Facts in the site's articles — history, geography, event dates — are checked the same way; when something can't be verified, it's left out rather than guessed at.

What this site covers

Three very different landscapes make up Kern County, and the site is organized around that split: the Central Valley around Bakersfield (agriculture, oil history, and the Bakersfield Sound music scene), the Sierra Nevada foothills around Kernville and Lake Isabella (whitewater rafting, hiking, Sequoia National Forest), and the Mojave Desert side of the county around Ridgecrest and Tehachapi (Red Rock Canyon, wind farms, dark-sky stargazing). Our visitor's guide is the best starting point for understanding how the three fit together.

Something out of date, or a listing that's closed? See our contact page — reader corrections are genuinely how this site stays accurate.