Welcome to the Hart Creek Estates Homeowner Association and Hart Creek Estates Mutual Water Company Website.
Hart Creek Estates is a small, quiet, residential community in the Hart Flat area of Kern County located 25 miles east of Bakersfield and 12 miles west of Tehachapi, California, accessed by Highway 58. It is one of five residential communities (Clear Creek, Hart Oaks, Valley View and independent homeowners) on the north slope of Bear Mountain.
Located near the original site of the Hart Flat settlement at the ascent of Bear Mountain, Hart Creek Estates’elevation ranges from 2800 feet to 3500 feet. The community encompasses about 700 acres. There are currently 88 properties with three adjacent properties that share facilities and 56 of the properties have residences on them (as of December 2010).
Hart Creek Estates, like the other communities, is governed by a homeowner's association directed by a board of directors elected by the property owners of HCE. The duties of the HOA are to make sure that the roads and common areas, such as the mail center and entrance landscaping, are properly maintained and to assure that the CC&Rs are enforced. The HOA currently has four standing committees, the Architectural Review Committee, The Roads Committee, the Entrance Committee and the Website Steering Committee. Each committee is comprised of community members and directors and is chaired by one of the directors.
Water is provided for the community by an independent mutual water company, wholly owned by the shareholders (property owners), and the water company is directed by a board of directors elected by the shareholders. The company has three wells and pumped and distributed over 15 million gallons of water in 2009. The company has two steel storage tanks with a total storage capacity of 205,000 gallons of water.
Summertime at HCE is usually very pleasant with temperatures about 10-15 degrees cooler than Bakersfield. Winter is accentuated with higher than typical rainfall for Kern County (usually 15 to 20 inches, but it is not unusual to have 30 or more inches of rain in some years), snow and bright, sunny, cold days. Fall and spring are usually sunny and pleasant with occasional early and late rains. Temperatures in Hart Flat range from the mid 90s in summer to as low as mid teens in the winter.
The terrain of Hart Flat is mountainous and covered with blue oaks, red oaks, live oaks, pines, buckeyes, sycamore along the creeks, and holly oak. For those who love wildlife there abounds numerous wild animals, typical sightings include deer, bobcats, bear, mountain lions, skunks, opossum, raccoon, grey squirrel, ground squirrel, elk, wild pigs, numerous varieties of reptiles and a few critters we’re not sure about. Avian wildlife includes the large raptors such as Bald Eagles, Golden Eagles, Redtailed Hawks and Perigrine Falcons; game birds include quail, dove and band tailed pigeons; in addition there is a large variety of the kinds of birds that birdwatchers enjoy viewing. All of Hart Flat is in the Condor Protection Zone, although they are not usually encountered here, their first cousins, the Turkey Vultures are abundant.
Each Hart Flat community has a beautiful view, but no two are the same. From Hart Creek Estates, if one looks north he would see first the northern rim of the Tehachapi Mountains, then across to the Piute Mountains and beyond them, the southern Sierra Nevadas. To the east, a crest of the Tehachapis over which lies the city of Tehachapi some 12 miles away. To the west, another crest of the Tehachapis over which lies the great central valley of California, the San Joaquin Valley, and the city of Bakersfield 25 miles away. To the south a view straight up Bear Mountain, which towers over Hart Flat at 6973 feet. Please, view our photos below.