The little grid of streets around Circle Park is what passes for downtown Kernville: a couple of blocks of old wooden facades, art galleries, an outdoor outfitter or two, a coffee shop and the kind of small-town hardware store you forget still exists. The wild-west character is partly real — Kernville's roots are in 1860s gold mining — and partly built for the tourists.
The Kern Valley Museum on Big Blue Road is small and worth half an hour: photographs of the old, drowned Kernville, mining and ranching artefacts, and exhibits on the Tubatulabal people who lived along the river before the gold rush arrived.