TEHACHAPI PARK HOLDS ANTIQUITY.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Daily News Staff Writer

In the grassy, rolling hills between Mojave and Tehachapi, late 20th-century Americans can catch a glimpse of how American Indians lived five to 15 centuries ago.

Open for guided tours over the next three months, Tomo-Kahni State Park contains the remains of stone rings on which the Kawaiisu Indians built their brush-covered huts, more than 400 bedrock mortar holes and a pictograph-adorned rock shelter sacred to the Kawaiisu known as Creation Cave.

``It's a trip in your mind,'' said Nick R. Lopez, one of the volunteer docents who leads the Sunday tours. ``When you see the rock rings and the things that are there, you have to visualize the people being there.''

Guided tours are noon to 4 p.m. Sundays during April and May, and from 8 a.m. to noon Sundays during June, when the weather is hotter.

To sign up for a tour, visitors must call the state parks office in Lancaster at [phone]. Park officials prefer reservations be made two weeks in advance. The fee is $5 for adults, $3 for youths and free for children under 6, though bringing children is not recommended.

Tours only occur during spring and fall, when the weather is most agreeable, and the only way for the general public to enter the park is by guided tour. Much of the ancient village site has been fenced off and is patrolled by state rangers.

``We are trying to keep it protected. It's delicate. There are some petroglyphs there we are trying to hold on to,'' Lopez said.

Located in Sand Canyon between Mojave and Tehachapi, the park land was purchased in January 1994 under a bill sponsored by former state Sen. Phil Wyman of Tehachapi.

Its name means ``winter home'' in the language of the Kawaiisu, a Shoshonean people who ranged from the Tehachapi area out to Red Rock Canyon and for whom the sheltered valley was a seasonal home.

Park officials warn that the tour, which lasts three to four hours, requires walking up and down hilly trails. State parks officials and volunteers hope eventually to build a visitors center to accommodate persons who cannot handle the strenuous hike.

The walking tour takes visitors up a steep dirt road past the rock dwelling rings, then to a sandstone ledge overlooking a spring that supplied water to the Kawaiisu. Into the sandstone is bored more than 400 holes in which women ground acorns and other wild seeds into meal.

A rock overhang across the spring from the mortar holes bears hundreds of vertical grooves rubbed into its surface by women sharpening animal bones into awls.

Before the 1952 Tehachapi earthquake, a creek ran year-round through the small valley, providing water for the inhabitants, Lopez said.

Up a rounded hill is a rock into which is scratched an ancient faded petroglyph of a bighorn sheep, two hunters and an animal figure that could be either a dog or a small sheep.

The Sunday tours do not take in the Creation Cave, which remains sacred to the surviving Kawaiisu.

The cave is a rock overhang about 20 feet high, 50 feet wide and 25 to 35 feet deep, adorned with simple but enigmatic paintings of people, animals and geometric shapes, the largest a snake 12 feet long.

Most artifacts found in the area date back to about 500 years ago, with a few as old as 1,500 years. But it was inhabited within the lifetime of the last full-blooded Kawaiisu, 82-year-old Andy Greene of Tehachapi.

``Andy remembers going there to visit his grandmother there and living with her there. It was inhabited probably as (recently) as 50 years ago. It goes back anywhere from 500 years to 1,500 years,'' Lopez said.

For the April and May tours, groups meet for an orientation talk at noon Sunday at the Errea House, 311 S. Green St., Tehachapi, across the street from the Tehachapi Museum. Then they car pool 12 miles to the park, which lies at the end of a one-mile stretch of a dirt and gravel road.

Tomo-Kahni State Park

PUBLIC ACCESS: By guided tour only.

TOURS: Noon to 4 p.m. Sundays during April and May, and 8 a.m. to noon Sundays during June.

RESERVATIONS: Call the state parks office in Lancaster at [phone], preferably two weeks in advance.

FEE: $5 for adults, $3 for those under 18, and free for children under 6, though bringing children is not recommended.

Tour groups meet at the Errea House, 311 S. Green St., Tehachapi, across the street from the Tehachapi Museum. Then they car pool 12 miles to the park.

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Box: Tomo-Kahni State Park (see text)