San Francisco's urban bison herd has persisted in the face of extinction, development, and disease.

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

The last remaining relic of San Francisco's glittering 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition.

An essential stop before plundering, BYO Cutlass.

A collection of 20th-century automata, penny arcade games, and musical contraptions.

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

A "gravitational anomaly" located in the redwood forests just outside of Santa Cruz, California.

A shop full of natural curiosities, carnivorous plants, and costumed taxidermied mice.

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

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

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

Scores of vintage street lamps shine along L.A.’s Miracle Mile.

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

A trash dump made beautiful by nature's power.

Tiki luxury on Nob Hill.

These delicate buggers are some of the rarest fossils that have bubbled up from the Tar Pits.

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

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

A huge musical instrument played by the ocean.