A Roman-style column in Oregon hides a spiral staircase inside.

A massive sea stack famous for its appearance in The Goonies.

This gorgeous beach hides behind two headlands in Oregon's Ecola State Park.

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

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

The miraculous hydrant that saved the Mission District in 1906.

Once the gateway to the utopian dream-village of a Civil War embalmer.

A huge musical instrument played by the ocean.

A mysterious painting of the self-declared Emperor of the United States watches over a local hof-brau.

A speck of nature and art in one of San Francisco’s most notorious neighborhoods.

A historic hotel that made a cameo in Hitchcock's classic film has no intention of letting guests forget its fame.

Furniture tries to escape an abandoned building in San Francisco.

Home of modern dancer famously strangled by her own scarf.

The only visible piece of San Francisco's most famous shipwreck.

This museum explores the history of the book, from scrolls to mass-produced objects through tools, stories, and massive cast-iron binding machinery (some of it operational).

A still functioning vaudeville carousel that has operated for over a century boasts a colorful menagerie and past.

A free, public museum dedicated to the fascinating science of sight.

San Francisco's oldest surviving monument and meeting place for 1906 survivors.

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

This tall and trim architectural oddity is one of the skinniest buildings in San Francisco.

Noble beasts perhaps, but not the Emperor's dogs.

The randomness of this wall of lava lamps helps encrypt up to 10 percent of the internet.

Staircase winds down the side of Telegraph Hill through gardens, wild parrots flying overhead.

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