This Big Sur waterfall drops 80 feet directly into the Pacific Ocean, and inspired the hillside house up top.

It's not your typical library, memorial, or book store.

A house built from trash known as the poor man's Hearst Castle.

Smooth basaltic rocks tell a tale of ancient glacial waterfalls.

The world’s largest concentrated solar plant generates as many problems as megawatts.

This giant temperature attraction created some giant electric bills.

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.

This historic national park is covered in the stunning ruins of red rock pueblos.

Ancient pueblos built into the base of a natural canyon wall.

This 4,000-foot-diameter hole is touted as "the most well known, best preserved meteorite crater on Earth."

This museum started as a collection of Manhattan Projects and continues to add exhibits as they are declassified.

Curiously, this large sporting goods store features 14 wax representations of American presidents.

These once-beautiful historic graveyards are set against the barren Virginia City hills.

The tragedy of the Japanese internment camps is remembered here by a stark "Soul Consoling Tower."

This railroad magnate's 19th century tower is more than a little bit out of place in the Nevada desert.

This central Nevada cave is the spiritual home of ancient and enigmatic pictographs.

Site of a classic 19th-century physics experiment to prove the earth is rotating.

Remains of Roman amphitheater hidden in a sleepy quarter of Paris.

A majestic lion statue guards this Parisian botanical garden, and feeds on an unsettling item.

A haunting collection of the vanished and disappearing natural world.

The unluckiest U-boat in the entire German fleet is now on display in a Chicago museum.

This long unused shot tower on the Mississippi remains a point of pride for a small city in Iowa.

It's big, it's a ball, and it's made of twine—the world's largest of its kind.

Thousands of turbines whir at the origin of North American wind power.