It's still possible to find a few places in Bakersfield where a person can almost sense wilderness. One of the best of these relatively unspoiled spots is Hanglider Hill and the adjacent foothills south of Hart Park. The car exhaust is somewhat diluted here, the traffic noise usually faint, kit foxes nearly as plentiful as people.
People come here to hike, run, ride horses and pedal mountain bikes.
They come here to scan the horizon for red-shouldered hawks, sift the dirt for fossils and stroll among clusters of a unique cactus that grow here and virtually here alone. Once upon a time this was the boonies, but today it sits on the northeasternmost edge of development in Bakersfield. In the past few months, the outdoorsy folk who have long enjoyed this rugged oasis of more than 1,000 acres have watched as urban Bakersfield threatened to gradually roll eastward, overtaking the hills that ring this corner of the city. The most prominent potential development in this new wave of growth is City in the Hills, a largely self-contained community along Highway 178 between Mesa Marin Raceway and the Panorama Bluffs. City in the Hills, a creation of developer Mountain View Bravo LLC, could eventually grow to house 11,500 people.