One of California’s most dramatic cliffside promenades, a rare 170-foot-long swinging bridge, and a spiritual sanctuary that holds some of Gandhi’s ashes.

Travel + Leisure compiled a list of 20 “secret” spots along the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

It’s firefall season in Yosemite. For two weeks each February, the angle of the sun makes a 1,500-foot waterfall on El Capitan light up like molten lava. The phenomenon only achieves its full effect, however, when the mountains are snowy enough to fuel the waterfall. Recent visitors have described the flow as meager. Still, it was enough for the photographer Glenn Lee Robinson to produce this incredible image, captured from a Cessna on Wednesday. 👇

This February marks 10 years since the mountain lion known as P22 was first discovered in Los Angeles Griffith Park. The revelation that a lone big cat somehow journeyed out of the mountains and took up residence in an urban park stunned biologists and made him a celebrity among Angelenos, who celebrated him in songs and murals. But the life of P22 has always been tinged by a certain melancholy: hemmed in by freeways and urban development, he is doomed to be forever alone. The Guardian

The photo of Los Angeles above was captured in January by the photographer Anas Hinde. It offers evidence for Lawrence Weschler’s classic 1998 paean to Los Angeles, “L.A. Glows,” in which he argues that soul of the city is its light. An excerpt:

“The day of that infamous slow-motion Bronco chase — actually, it was already past sundown here in New York as I sat before the glowing TV in our darkening kitchen, transfixed by the unfurling stream of bob-and-wafting helicopter images, hot tears streaming down my cheeks — my eight-year-old daughter gazed for a while at the screen and then over at me, at which point, baffled and concerned, she inquired, ‘What’s wrong, Daddy? Did you know that guy?’

“‘What guy?’ I stammered, surfacing from my trance, momentarily disoriented. ‘Oh, no, no. I didn’t know the guy. I don’t give a damn about the guy. It’s that light! That’s the light I keep telling you girls about.’ You girls: her mother and her. That light: the late-afternoon light of Los Angeles — golden pink off the bay through the smog and onto the palm fronds. A light I’ve found myself pining for every day of the nearly two decades since I left Southern California.”

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Weschler revisted his essay in a 2016 video. 👉 New Yorker (~5 mins)

“It is fantastic technology and a lousy company.” A Los Angeles company called Second Sight made retinal implants used by more than 350 patients, transforming lives. Then in 2019, the company abandoned the technology and nearly went bankrupt, leaving early adopters with bionic eyes that were suddenly obsolete and unsupported. Now they are scrambling for secondhand parts to preserve their vision. IEEE Spectrum

While retail theft in the Bay Area and Los Angeles has drawn widespread attention, another sort thievery is causing anxiety in rural California. Thefts of honeybee colonies that pollinate the state’s many orchards have already surged this year past the totals for all of 2021. In a recent heist, a collection of colonies valued at more than $150,000 vanished from a property in Mendocino County. The perpetrators of such crimes don’t fit the typical profile, a sheriff’s deputy said: “It’s bad beekeepers stealing from good beekeepers.” Press Democrat

A few notable homes on the market:

• Blending into a rocky hillside on the outskirts of Palm Springs is a masterpiece of desert modernism. Built in 1955 by the Swiss architect Albert Frey, the green-and-yellow home was restored to be as close to the original design as possible. Yours for $1.85 million. Dwell | Spaces

• Miles Davis spent his his twilight years in Malibu, making music in his beachfront home and driving around in a yellow Ferrari. Fittingly, his house was designed by a firm credited with helping to define the “ultra-cool” architectural scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Asking: $15 million. Wall Street Journal

• A landmarked home in Pasadena showcases the early Craftsman aesthetic by the architectural masters Charles and Henry Greene. Built in 1906, it has elaborate woodwork, stained-glass windows, and a butler’s pantry. Asking: $5 million. Pasadena Star-News | Circa