The largest collection of mummies and Egyptian artifacts on the West Coast is tucked into a residential area of San Jose, across the street from a middle school. The museum houses 4,000 artifacts and four human mummies—not to mention mummies of cats, sharks, and baboons.

The atypically smooth, shiny patches on these blueschist rocks in Sonoma County all fall between 10 and 14 feet above the ground. That's the approximate shoulder height for an adult Columbian mammoth, part of why scientists believe that the massive mammals once used these boulders to groom themselves.

On two low mesas just north of Blythe, California, gigantic figures are drawn on the ground. The Blythe Intaglios depict three humans, two animals, and a spiral, and are believed to have been made by the Mohave and Quechan peoples somewhere between 450 and 2,000 years ago.

The same turbulent forces that heat the waters of Calistoga’s famous hot springs and geysers once turned a forest to stone. Three-and-a-half million years ago, an ancient volcano knocked down and buried a forest, including a grove of enormous redwoods.

Though Fossil Falls has been dry for a long time, the landscape was shaped by ancient water. Nearly 20,000 years ago, volcanic flow left fields of rock in what is now the Inyo Desert. When glaciers melted after the last ice age, they formed rivers and lakes, which shaped that rock into smooth, twisted formations that descend into steep cliffs.

Hidden along a narrow, steep, and windy road is a tiny piece of Chumash history preserved forever. On the rock walls, colorful symbols made long before European settlement are a bright contrast against the pale sandstone.

One of the attractions of the 1915 Panama–California Exposition was an anthropology exhibit that would eventually grow into San Diego's Museum of Us. Their exhibits and programs explore the human experience, from beer-brewing and mythological monsters to Ancient Egyptians and the Indigenous people of Southern California.