This glamorous old building is said to have inspired the Tower of Terror.

After starting as a whimsical tourist attraction that eventually found its way to ruin, these renovated canals offer a lush and exotic locale on the Pacific Coast.

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

Visible below the waves are memorials to the city's Gold Rush dead.

Trails through lava-carved tube-caves display sparkling bacteria and a rich history.

Canyon walls shrouded in ferns.

The one-time watch house for incoming ships at the Golden Gate now stands abandoned and hidden in trees.

Aqueducts have dramatically changed this old lake, now home to tufa towers and its very own species of tiny brine shrimp.

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

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

Quite simply the largest tree in the world (by volume).

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

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

World-famous, Pink's still manages to keep its prized cult fetish status.

Each year these high desert hills are absolutely covered with poppy flowers in a surreal show of nature.

Left untouched since a double murder-suicide in the 1960s, Los Feliz murder mansion remains a neighborhood mystery.

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

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

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

An underground mansion with fruit-bearing trees and grapes growing beneath the surface of central California.

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

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

Olfactory delights in San Francisco's Botanical Gardens.

Crypt mausoleum in cathedral's basement contains relics of third century Roman martyr, Saint Vibiana.