The set location for a 1987 cult classic draws international film buffs to the middle of the Mojave Desert.

An abandoned Jazz Age dream home and con man's hideout in Death Valley.

Ten 25-foot-tall, beehive-shaped kilns, abandoned in Death Valley.

A pier that used to act as a busy ferry dock is now a decaying favorite of local fisherman and urban artists.

The liveliest ghost town in the state.

The "Fun Spot of the Desert" is now a haunting ruin, and a reminder that putting a water park in a desert is a bad idea.

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

A lawless town deep in Death Valley was famous for its riches and death rate.

Once a place of peaceful repose, this sanitarium now faces an uncertain future.

The second-largest giant sequoia in the world.

Once thought to be the oldest living tree in the world, Methuselah was germinated before the Egyptian pyramids were built.

An abandoned early 20th-century gold mine in a spectacular setting overlooking Bridgeport Valley and the Sierra Nevada.

Bodie's 20th-century rival was a paragon of respectability and calm—but the mines eventually ran dry.

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

Deep vertical fissures like miniature slot canyons cut across the cemented volcanic rock of Black Point above Mono Lake.

A 19th-century cabin built into a hollowed-out Sequoia tree.

Across Ring Mountain is a vast collection of Native American petroglyphs unique to the region.

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

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

Each winter this underground cave forms a dazzling ice palace.

The flow from this waterfall sometimes comes out of springs below its rim.

Massive prehistoric mammals used these stones as oversized scratching posts.

A ghost town originally established and governed solely by Black Americans seeking a place of their own, free from discrimination.

Spend a day hanging out with domesticated Russian foxes.