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

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

Olfactory delights in San Francisco's Botanical Gardens.

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

Relics of the 1894 Midwinter Exposition continue to delight visitors today.

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

This shop specializes in oddities and Victorian-inspired wonders.

Get lost in this haunting fairytale art walk through a man-made eucalyptus grove.

The only theatre in the world constructed specifically for sound movement.

A winding path built in secret on the edge of the continent.

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

An artsy hidden staircase leads to breathtaking views of San Francisco.

An art collective teaching the more fiery, metal-y art forms.

A crumbling Beaux Arts monument to the Bay Area's age of rail.

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

A once popular resort—said to be the vacation spot of gangster Al Capone—now remains abandoned in the woods of Arizona.

Once the product of an inexplicable gold strike, this ghost town is now home to one man and his love of classic machines.

A Wild West jailhouse that slid down the mountainside.

A spiritual vortex among the red rocks in Sedona.

Dramatic river bend surrounds a natural red-rocked pedestal.

Most-visited and most-photographed slot canyon in the American Southwest.

Open since 1938, this diner has kept its fountain, malt machine, and all the gum that greasers left beneath its counter.

This Arizona observatory is famous for investigations into Martian life, and as the place humans first spotted Pluto.

An urban laboratory.