This private residence was the template for one of the most beloved television homes of all time.

A walk-in working camera obscura produces 360-degree live images of the San Francisco coast.

The seawater playground of gilded-era San Francisco burned to the ground in 1966.

The key to turning shifting dunes into the green oasis of Golden Gate Park.

San Francisco's urban bison herd has persisted in the face of extinction, development, and disease.

The remains of a ruined mansion memorialize the 1906 earthquake.

Carnivorous plants, medieval aphrodisiacs, and the largest original wood structure glass conservatory in the western hemisphere.

A huge musical instrument played by the ocean.

The last remaining relic of San Francisco's glittering 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition.

A hand-built folk art installation covered with messages of God's love.

The lowest point in North America is home to an undrinkable pool surrounded by fields of geometric salt flats.

Only intact Ichthyosaur skeleton in the United States.

The most magnificent bottle house in a town strangely full of them.

Fans of vintage Vegas, kitsch, and toy pony-based gambling now flock to a casino called The D.

Rich red almandine gemstones are waiting inside the volcanic rock strewn across this eastern Nevada hillside.

This tiny cluster of abandoned buildings looks like the future of the ghost town - today!

Temporary Burning Man sculpture made of two 18-wheelers.

Decades' worth of lost and forgotten objects make up the collection of this tantalizingly odd little museum.

Formerly the world's largest, this Willy Wonka-esque contraption runs 24/7.

An enormous illuminated figure dances on the Las Vegas strip.

A giant open-air sculpture made of over 200 full-sized boats.

Las Vegas's very own 40-foot-tall fire-spewing praying mantis.

An exotic wildlife habitat right off The Strip.

A gothic palace of endless stalagmites and pseudoscorpions waits within one of the world's most beautiful caves.