A perfectly circular lake is formed by the crater of an ancient underwater volcano.

A life-sized mammoth sculpture marks the spot where the remains of a Columbian mammoth were discovered in 2005.

This odd California folly seems like it was almost designed to accumulate urban legends.

A Barbary Coast watering hole built into a Gold Rush shipwreck.

An extraordinarily ornate museum in San Diego holds wondrous anthropological treasures.

Lemon Grove, California is known for its giant lemon...and mummified bodies.

It would be a crime to miss it.

The only statue of its kind to commemorate Washington's beginnings as an officer of the British Colonial Militia.

Formerly secret, precariously perched boulders.

An archive of nearly every day of Buckminster Fuller's life.

A working model of the entire San Francisco Bay and much of the Sacramento River Delta, complete with regular tides that change every 14 minutes.

Recovered from the brink of extinction, at home in the Financial District.

A rococo retro-futurist future-rustic vernacular between yesterday’s tomorrow and the future that never was.

Furniture tries to escape an abandoned building in San Francisco.

A shop full of natural curiosities, carnivorous plants, and costumed taxidermied mice.

An essential stop before plundering, BYO Cutlass.

This Oakland fairytale kingdom, fiercely devoted to childlike whimsy, was an early inspiration for Disneyland.

Bonsai garden in Oakland is curated by the first non-Japanese female bonsai master in the United States.

International delicatessen has been owned and operated by the same family for more than 110 years.

Dive bar built out of the remains of a whaling ship.

Antiques by the Bay.

Elephant seals and sea lions have turned the abandoned buildings on this island into their endangered love shack.

Location of the most powerful laser in the world, and the potential birthplace of tiny stars.

An ominous concrete cube cuts a dystopian silhouette atop this California mountain.