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• The walls of this Death Valley canyon are polished marble, and many hikers turn back at a boulder pile 1.3 miles in

• From this Joshua Tree overlook you can see the San Andreas Fault and a lake 230 feet below sea level, and the walk is only a quarter mile

• Death Valley gets less than 2 inches of rain a year, and floodwater still carved a stone bridge across this canyon

• The scientists who set the ground rules for genetic engineering met at this Monterey Peninsula beach camp, and the dune trail out front is open to everyone

• This redwood road once hauled wagons to Oregon’s mines, and it’s still too narrow for an RV

• This beach below the Golden Gate Bridge was guarded by Army guns for 36 years, and the battery is still standing over the sand

• Elephant seals disappeared from Point Reyes for 150 years, and the first pup to come back was born below this easy bluff trail

• Redding built a 217-foot sundial you can walk across, and it only tells time four hours a day

• This Santa Cruz dairy ranch made its own electricity in the 1880s, and the flat bluff trail behind it passes a sea lion hangout

• John D. Rockefeller Jr. came to lunch in these Humboldt redwoods in 1926, and his checks saved the largest old-growth redwood forest left on Earth

• You climb down a ladder into this Mojave lava tube, and at midday the sun drops a spotlight through its ceiling

• Hitchcock filmed The Birds in this Sonoma Coast town, and the 1873 schoolhouse from its creepiest scene is still standing

• Highway 1 kept crumbling off this Pacifica cliff, so California built tunnels and gave the old road to walkers

• This Eastern Sierra lake hides thousands of stone columns, and it took an LA reservoir to uncover them

• This Big Sur cove once shipped tree bark through a tunnel in the cliff, and the short hike down still walks you right through it

• This Central Coast cove was a Prohibition bootlegger drop, and the cliff trail above it is an easy 4-mile walk

• This lake near Mount Shasta is named for its heart shape, and you can’t see it from the shore

• Hearst’s private zoo closed in 1937, but his zebras never left, and you can still spot them from Highway 1

• A businessman tried to build a giant concrete dinosaur on this Pismo Beach cliff, and his neighbors stopped him before it got a head

• One easy trail near Mount Shasta strings together three waterfalls, and the middle one is 80 feet wide

• Mount Tam once had the “crookedest railroad in the world,” and the ride back down ran on gravity alone

• Muir Woods almost became a reservoir, and the man who saved it refused to let it carry his name

• This tunnel of trees in Point Reyes was planted for a radio station, and volunteers at the end still tap out Morse code

• A $260 million wildfire started deep in this Big Sur canyon, and the redwood trail into it is just 2.5 miles round trip

• This California lighthouse survived the tsunami that wrecked 29 city blocks, and you can only walk to it at low tide

• Joshua Tree’s biggest palm grove is almost 4 miles from the nearest parking lot, and fall is when the hike finally makes sense

• Death Valley’s most famous haul wasn’t gold, and the wagons that dragged it 165 miles still sit off the highway

• This Santa Cruz beach was named for three stone arches, and the ocean has already taken two of them

• Gold Rush speculators cut down this giant sequoia to dance on its stump, and the stump is still sitting in the forest

• The only road into Kings Canyon’s Cedar Grove shuts for winter in mid-November, and the easy walks at the bottom are worth the drive now

• This Mendocino trail walks you up a staircase the ocean built, and the century-old trees at the top are barely 10 feet tall

• Nine ancient volcanoes line up between San Luis Obispo and the sea, and the tallest one is a 3.5-mile hike

• The rocks on this Sonoma Coast bluff look like honeycomb, and the stone beside them helped build San Francisco

• This Sonoma County redwood has been growing for over 1,400 years, and you can walk in to see it for free

• Bats keep half of this California cave closed most of the year, and right now you can walk all of it

• A sea cave collapsed on this Mendocino headland, and at high tide the ocean churns inside the 60-foot hole it left

• This Mojave canyon has steel rings bolted into its walls, and the only way to finish the loop is to climb them

• R2-D2 rolled through this Death Valley canyon in the first Star Wars, and fall is when hiking it stops being a bad idea

• The trees on this Carmel headland grow wild in only two places on Earth, and that orange fuzz on them isn’t moss

• This California coast town crowns a 2,000-pound pumpkin every October, and a world record here pays $30,000

• This rock formation an hour from LA has been in 200 movies, and an outlaw hid here first

• The 1989 earthquake that collapsed part of the Bay Bridge started under a Santa Cruz redwood forest, and you can hike to the spot

• San Francisco once had a glass palace for 10,000 swimmers, and the Pacific still washes through what’s left

• This San Francisco park has had bison since 1891, and the herd is entirely female on purpose

• Walt Disney’s ski resort was supposed to go in this Sequoia valley, and the only road in won’t be finished until 2027

• California’s own elk nearly vanished in the 1870s, and right now their bulls are bugling across this Marin County bluff

• This Bay Area lighthouse hides behind a hand-carved tunnel, and the door only opens one Saturday a month

• Male tarantulas are roaming this Bay Area mountain looking for love right now, and the females they’re after can live 25 years

• This Route 66 volcano faked an eruption for a 1959 Hollywood film, and October opens the season to hike into it

• This California mountain is made of volcanic glass, and it erupted from the biggest volcano in the Cascades less than 1,000 years ago