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Tucked in a grassy canyon along the Central Coast is a high school where students chop wood and tend livestock between their history and calculus classes. Doubling as a working farm, the campus differs from the typical American high school in another crucial respect: No one among the faculty or the roughly 90 students ever…

Two centuries ago, delivering mail across the icy Sierra Nevada was virtually impossible during the winter — until the arrival of a blonde-bearded Viking with piercing blue eyes and an uncommon fortitude. John Thompson had immigrated with his family from Norway when he was 10 years old. Enticed west by the gold fields of California, he settled…

There was a time in California when pretty much everybody went to the drive-in movie theater. Pioneered in New Jersey in 1933, the idea caught on quickly in warm, car-loving California. By the 1960s, more than 220 were operating across the state. The outdoor theater was conceived in part as a family-friendly alternative to the…

1. San Francisco and Oakland are the nation’s capitals of same-sex marriage. According to figures released in 2016, San Francisco had the highest rate of men marrying men, at 3.2 percent of marriages, and Oakland had the highest rate of women marrying women, at 2.1 percent of marriages. N.Y. Times Cast members performed the musical…

In California, a county, a bay, a university, and a state park all bear the name of Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist whose fame was once regarded as second only to Napoleon. “Yet Humboldt,” writes Andrea Wulf, a Humboldt biographer, “is almost forgotten in the English-speaking world.” Born to wealth in 1769, Humboldt walked…

Two centuries ago, an estimated 10,000 grizzly bears roamed as rulers of the California wilderness. Then came the juggernaut of humankind known as the Gold Rush. Settlers who poured into California seeking riches killed the burly giants with abandon, first out of fear, then for bragging rights. By 1889, the grizzlies were already scarce. It…

An illustration of how California would have looked around 1850. Tulare Lake is the large body of water to the lower right. It vanished with the rise of irrigation farming. Mark Clark 1. California’s Central Valley used to be so watery that you could take a boat between San Francisco and Bakersfield. Long since vanished,…

When Adam Tenenbaum hung a few chandeliers from a tree in the front yard of his Los Angeles home, he worried about how people would react. Eleven years and 31 additional chandeliers later, the so-called Chandelier Tree is a full-fledged Los Angeles landmark, cherished by his neighbors in the Silver Lake area as well as…

Legend has it that if you behold an elusive flicker of green light above the setting sun, you will acquire telepathic powers. While evidence is scant for the supernatural properties of the so-called green flash, the celestial phenomenon is very real. Green flashes occur regularly on the Pacific horizon when the atmosphere, acting as a…

Some people have wondered if the strange sky formations around California’s Mount Shasta were UFOs, or perhaps some kind of cloaking device used by aliens to visit undetected. But as human scientists tell us, they’re just clouds — albeit of a strange variety. They’re called lenticular clouds, and Mount Shasta is one of the best places in…