Visiting California City

California City sits in the Fremont Valley of eastern Kern County, roughly a hundred miles north of Los Angeles and a short drive east of Highway 14, at about 2,400 feet. It is high desert: hot and bright in summer, genuinely cold on winter nights, and windy for much of the spring.

The built part of town is small and quickly walked. Central Park, with the 26-acre man-made lake that was drawn into the original 1950s master plan, is the one piece of the grand design that got finished, and it is worth seeing precisely because of the gap between it and everything around it. Drive ten minutes east and the streets are named, graded, and empty.

The airport. California City Municipal Airport (FAA identifier L71) is owned by the city and sits on 245 acres with a single asphalt runway, 06/24, 6,027 by 60 feet, at an elevation of about 2,454 feet. There is no scheduled service; it is a general-aviation field, and the length of that runway for a town this size is one of the more visible legacies of what California City was planned to become. For current field conditions, fuel and frequencies, use a current aeronautical source rather than this page — it is not maintained as an aviation reference.