A strange house built only at night, with rumored mystic inspiration.

Once close to extinction, there is no shortage of elephant seals on the beaches of Año Nuevo State Park.

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

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

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

This rare example of a "tidefall" is a spectacular drop from the cliffs down onto the beach.

Fifty years after a “blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds,” this idyllic natural area commemorates the carnage.

The first North American landing spot for James Cook on his third voyage of discovery in the Pacific.

On the Oregon coast there is a natural hole that seems to be draining the sea.

A New England-style lighthouse along California's beautiful Highway 1 gets a re-do.

The lighthouse central to the 1980s horror classic "The Fog" is, in fact, located in one of the foggiest areas of the Pacific Coast.

Massive prehistoric mammals used these stones as oversized scratching posts.

The southernmost outpost of the Russian Empire in colonial America.

This whimsical seashell-shaped place of worship was designed to blend into its surroundings.

The mysterious round rocks of Schooner Gulch.

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

Celebrating the transformation of trash into objects of beauty.

A trash dump made beautiful by nature's power.

An optical illusion found amid a logged redwood forest.

A grove of "candelabra redwoods" deep in California's Lost Coast.

This massive redwood tree has a hole in the base big enough to drive through.

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

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

Canyon walls shrouded in ferns.