Alta Sierra CDP (Kern County), CA

Alta Sierra is a small census-designated place in Kern County's southern Sierra country, above the Kern River Valley near Lake Isabella. The community sits along the Highway 155 corridor between Wofford Heights and Glennville, with Greenhorn Mountain Park using an Alta Sierra address. Tall mountain roads, forest edges, and the nearby reservoir do more to set the local map than any town center.

The name is easy to confuse with Alta Sierra in Nevada County, but this is the Kern County mountain community. The surrounding recreation map includes Greenhorn Mountain Park, Lake Isabella, and the Alta Sierra Ski Resort in the Greenhorn Mountains; the resort was formerly known as Shirley Meadows. Kern County places Alta Sierra in the Lake Isabella subarea, alongside Wofford Heights, Kernville, and other upper-valley communities. The local scoop is that Alta Sierra is a forest-and-highway place: one name ties together a small CDP, a mountain park, a ski area, and the roads into the Kern River Valley.