Mather Airport

California's capital is a Gold Rush city. When James Marshall found gold in the foothills in 1848, merchant Sam Brannan opened a store on John Sutter's riverfront embarkadero, and the rush did the rest — Sacramento was the trading post where every miner outfitted before heading to the diggings. The waterfront survives as Old Sacramento, the West's first historic district: 53 preserved 1850s buildings on raised wooden sidewalks (the streets were jacked up a full story after repeated floods, leaving tunnels still under downtown), plus the California State Railroad Museum and the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad. The State Capitol's copper dome rises a mile east, linked to the river by the Tower Bridge — painted metallic gold by public vote, a vertical-lift span that's also the shortest state highway in California. Sutter's Fort, where it all began, still stands a few blocks farther.

The world's largest concrete "drain" — a 72-foot-diameter funnel that pulls water down 200 feet into a tunnel cut through the canyon wall. It is the spillway for Monticello Dam, built in 1957 to flood the agricultural town of Monticello and create Lake Berryessa, which still supplies water to Solano County. The dam sits at Devil's Gate, a narrow gorge with no room for a conventional channel spillway, so engineers built a bellmouth — a morning glory spillway, named for the flower. Locals call it the Glory Hole. It only activates when the lake reaches 440 feet elevation — full pool. From 2006 through 2024 it ran exactly twice (2017 and 2019). Then back-to-back wet winters in 2024 and 2025 brought it roaring back. When dry, the rim sticks out of the water like a concrete crown. When the lake is full and the spillway is going, water pours over the rim in a smooth laminar sheet and disappears straight down — a circular waterfall in the middle of the lake.

The Sierra foothills northeast of Sacramento are the Mother Lode — Highway 49, named for the '49ers, threads the Gold Rush towns. Grass Valley's Empire Mine is the crown: one of the oldest, deepest, and richest hardrock gold mines in California, worked for over a century until 1956. It pulled 5.8 million ounces of gold from 367 miles of underground passages reaching nearly a vertical mile down — all of it now flooded and silent since the pumps stopped. Above ground, mine owner William Bourn Jr.'s cottage and formal gardens survive, and the visitor center's "Secret Room" holds a scale model of the whole impossible maze. Unlike placer gold you pan from a stream, this was won by men in buckets lowered into the dark to drill and blast. The park is on the National Register.

Rising alone out of the flat east of San Francisco Bay, Mount Diablo punches far above its 3,849 feet because nothing around it competes — on a clear day the summit sees over 100 miles, reportedly across 40,000 square miles, one of the largest viewsheds of any peak on Earth. That visibility made it a survey datum: in 1851 the summit was chosen as the Initial Point of the Mount Diablo Meridian, and to this day nearly every property line in northern California and all of Nevada is measured from this one mountaintop. The CCC-built summit building holds the survey marker and a small museum. The aviation hook: the summit beacon, built in 1928 to guide airmail and commercial pilots and visible for 100 miles, was first lit by Charles Lindbergh — and is still lit once a year, every December 7th, for Pearl Harbor Day.