Columbia, CA
A grass-and-asphalt strip in the Sierra Nevada foothills surrounded by the Stanislaus National Forest. Columbia State Historic Park, just north of the field, preserves the most intact Gold Rush town in California — wooden boardwalks, stagecoach rides, blacksmith demonstrations, and an 1850s feel. The town of Columbia struck $87 million in gold in the 1850s and 60s. A favorite small-airport destination for Bay Area pilots looking for fresh air, pine trees, and a step into the past.
You can land at Columbia Airport and walk straight into 1852. Columbia is the best-preserved Gold Rush town in California — a National Historic Landmark District where roughly $4.7 billion in today's dollars came out of the ground, briefly making it one of the state's largest cities. Where most boomtowns burned or rotted away, Columbia rebuilt in brick after fires and then simply never died. Today the main street is a living town: wooden boardwalks, costumed docents, a working blacksmith, stagecoach rides, gold panning, the 1858 Wells Fargo office, two original firehouses, an antique bowling alley. The airport sits right at the edge of the state historic park — one of the great fly-in destinations in the country, where the walk from the ramp is a walk into the 1850s.
Just outside KMER. Over 70 military aircraft on outdoor display, including the holy grail of bomber collections: a Convair B-36 Peacemaker (one of only four left), a B-52D Stratofortress, an SR-71A Blackbird, a U-2 Dragon Lady, a B-58 Hustler, an F-14 Tomcat, an F-105 Thunderchief, and many more. Castle was a SAC base from 1941 until 1995, training B-52 crews for the nuclear deterrent mission. The aircraft sit on the same ramp where Cold War alert crews waited for the call that, thankfully, never came.
One of the most iconic landscapes in America from the air. Half Dome's sheer 2,000-foot face, El Capitan's 3,000-foot granite wall, Yosemite Falls cascading 2,425 feet — all visible on a clear day from above the Sierra Nevada crest. The high country east of the valley (Tuolumne Meadows, Cathedral Range) is just as dramatic as the iconic walls — granite domes and alpine lakes above 8,000ft. Tioga Pass at 9,943ft is the eastern gateway through the Sierra crest from Lee Vining.
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.