The California capital city once stood 10 feet lower than it does today.

The quiet canyon has a tumultuous history involving a doomsday cult.

The long, arduous journey of the stones of the Abbey of New Clairvaux.

The show's fictional Korean medical camp was created in the Santa Monica hills.

Another of California's unused Cold War missile defense complexes has become a graffiti gallery.

The now-abandoned tunnels were built for the transcontinental railroad on the route where the first wagon train entered California.

A desert ghost town—occupied for only 12 years—was once home to more than 500 silver mines.

These delicate buggers are some of the rarest fossils that have bubbled up from the Tar Pits.

Standing in a state of "arrested decay," this ghost town allows for a detailed peek into Gold Rush life in an unusually harsh climate.

Canyon walls shrouded in ferns.

San Francisco's newly reopened hands-on science museum.

Aqueducts have dramatically changed this old lake, now home to tufa towers and its very own species of tiny brine shrimp.

A hotel and restaurant serving as the mecca of kitsch.

In all of the 29 years it was in operation, no prisoners ever escaped successfully... or so they claim.

A peculiar mansion built by the troubled heir to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune.

The Empire Mine is "one of the oldest, largest, deepest, longest and richest gold mines in California."

Graffiti-covered ruins that were once part of a farm owned by a mental hospital.