A storybook European village in Berkeley.

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

This dry lake bed contains the oldest known petroglyphs in North America.

The modest home of the very immodest dancer who cost a king his crown.

A middle school sports field that many believe was the true location of the first successful powered flight - and not by the Wright Brothers.

One of only five observatories in the world built to measure the Earth's wobble.

One of the largest Buddhist communities in the West sits on the site of an old hospital.

A raised boardwalk winds through a thicket of stunted, century-old trees no more than nine feet tall.

Downieville's largest Gold Rush structure still standing has one of the longest bars in California.

Rising out of miles of farmland, these buttes are sometimes called the world's smallest mountain range.

A volcanic landmark located on an Ice age lake bed.

Massive crater in central Oregon.

This large maar crater in Oregon is the bigger brother to Hole in the Ground.

Experience Larry Spring's self-taught "common sense" laws of physics.

Celebrating the transformation of trash into objects of beauty.

A trash dump made beautiful by nature's power.

The oldest orange tree in California spawned a generation of citrus farmers.

Secret Manor, a house full of legends, the least of which is the haunting of long-deceased ladies of pleasure.

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

Home of what was the largest hydraulic mine in the world, producing gold and the first diamonds in the U.S.

An optical illusion found amid a logged redwood forest.

A crumbling wizard is one of the final reminders of a roadside Middle Earth.

This historic steamboat is scuttled just a few hundred feet from where it was built over a hundred years ago.

One of the most scenic stretches of road in America winds between some of the country's oldest trees.