We’re OK for now – but Eternal Vigilance is required to protect our natural resources!

In February, 2018, The J.G. Boswell Company notified Tulare County government that it was formally withdrawing its application for Yokohl Ranch, a new city planned for development on 36,000 acres in Yokohl Valley. east of Exeter and Lindsay.

However, we remind folks that “eternal vigilance” is the ongoing price to protect our natural environment!

Background about Yokohl Valley:

Yokohl Valley, named after a band of Foothill Yokuts people, is located in the Sierra Nevada foothills, east of Visalia and Exeter, and south of Lake Kaweah. This part of Tulare County is varied in terrain and vegetation, containing steep slopes, expansive valleys, waterways, oak woodlands, stands of sycamores, grasslands, chaparral, rare vernal pools, and wonderful wildflowers. Here where the foothills begin to rise above the level land, pleasing the eye and providing habitat for a myriad of plants and animals, humans have traveled and lived for many centuries.

Over 30 important Native American sites, some dating back thousands of years, have been documented in Yokohl Valley, including significant rock art areas, four major village sites, unique rock slides (like playground slides), ceremonial cupules, gathering and processing sites, bedrock mortars, and several burial grounds. Many of these are world-class in the quality of their artifacts and information, and all of them are sacred to the descendants of these early Native American residents, many of whom still live nearby and continue to visit their ancestral homelands.

During the 1700s and 1800s, Spanish soldiers and missionaries passed through Yokohl Valley, and the Spaniards may have done a bit of mining in the area. The Yokodo Yokuts mined soapstone near Lindsay Peak, and they mined magnesite on Badger Hill, which they used to make a whitish-gray paint. The Yokodo called Badger Hill Hawshau Shido, “Paint Place,” after the magnesite mine. The mine was located where the Badger Estates water tanks now stand. The Yokodo Yokuts also made a pure white pigment from white clay that a southern tribe mined on the White River. White pigment was valuable and the Yokuts traded these commodities throughout the San Joaquin Valley. Exeter’s Rocky Hill, called Chahkah Shahnau, “Live Oak Place”, is still an important site for contemporary Yokuts, who consider it the historic start of Yokohl Valley.

In the mid-19th century, ranchers started grazing cattle and sheep in Yokohl Valley, and descendants of two of these original families are ranching on their homeplaces today. One of the original ranch houses is now over 120 years old, and still in use. Parts of old schoolhouses and several homestead foundations and chimneys also remain.

In a meadow in Jordan Flat, the cabin of Wiley Hinds still overlooks the valley. Born into slavery in Arkansas in 1836, Wiley Hinds in the 1850s worked his way to California, and by 1868, he had saved enough money to buy his first 80 acres, in the Horse Creek drainage, and to build his cabin. Eventually, he helped another black rancher, Arthur Barron, to acquire 160 acres just south of the Jordan Flat ranch. At the turn of the last century, the Catron cabin was built, where the Boswell Company’s ranch manager Harvey Ruth spent much of his time, at the head of Wells Creek.

The Jordan Trail, constructed by John Jordan in 1862, is still visible in many areas of the valley, until the old trail climbs steeply up Blue Ridge while the paved road switchbacks more slowly up the long grade. Cattle were driven over this toll trail from the Central Valley across the Sierra and down to Independence and the Coso silver mines in the Owens Valley on the eastern side of the range. Jordan’s descendants settled in several locations throughout Yokohl’s central valley, and their descendants continue to hold summer reunions in Mooney Grove.

Amazingly, much of the Yokohl Valley area still looks much as it did 150 years ago, and still provides a home to many native species of plants and animals, including several that are threatened or endangered. Annual grasslands, meadows, chaparral, upland areas, rocky outcroppings, cliffs, riparian corridors, vernal pools, foothill pine, and oak woodlands provide habitat for wildlife ranging from western pond turtles to the more expected denizens such as deer, coyotes, mountain lions, bobcats, opossums, skunks, and raccoons.

Bedecked with their spring fairy rings of flowers, the valley’s vernal pools host unique fairy shrimp. Western spadefoots live here, too, along with special plant species such as spiny sepaled button celery and Kaweah brodiaea. Every year for a month or two, carpets of pink, purple, blue, white, yellow, orange, and red line the little road through the valley and up the hill as popcorn flower, fiddleneck, lupine, Chinese houses, fairy lanterns, Madia, monkey flowers and farewell to spring bloom in their brilliant succession against the green grass that turns so soon to summer gold.

Yokohl’s wonderful birdlife includes ferruginous hawks, golden and bald eagles, merlins, prairie falcons, long-billed curlews, burrowing owls, loggerhead shrikes, horned larks, purple martins, mountain bluebirds, vesper sparrows, and tricolored blackbirds, along with many more commonly seen and enjoyed species that frequent the area. Often you will hear the beautiful song of the western meadowlarks, and sometimes the whistling calls of the curlews in flight. Additionally, Yokohl adjoins the Blue Ridge National Wildlife Refuge, established to protect a traditional roosting site of the California condor. For thousands of years, Yokohl Valley provided critical foraging habitat for that magnificent bird. Gazing up from Yokohl’s grasslands, one can readily imagine the sight that the Yokuts saw daily and that could be seen here still until just 25 years ago: birds that are among the biggest in the world soaring silently overhead, high over the valley’s plain, the stream, the great rocks, the trees, the rugged hilltops, high against the white clouds, then vanishing into the blue.

Locals and visitors alike, bicyclists, motorcyclists, hikers, runners, wildflower enthusiasts, nature lovers, historians, artists, photographers, birders, connoisseurs of California’s scenic byways, and anyone who craves a glimpse of the old West will savor a visit to Yokohl Valley. With its splendid, unspoiled, ever-changing vistas, Yokohl’s winding rural road has been marked for designation as an official county scenic route for decades.

Stop on your journey to listen to the quiet and to marvel at the beauty and the lives and the stories that have been nourished through the centuries by this treasure of Tulare County.