San Francisco to Los Angeles

San Francisco City Hall is one of the largest domed structures in the United States.

You're crossing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and the eastern span you're on is an engineering landmark.

On October 20, 1991, a grass fire that had been incompletely extinguished the day before reignited in the hills to the east of where you are now.

The Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum complex you can spot near here is one of the last multi-sport venue sites built in the 1960s.

Castro Valley is named after Don Guillermo Castro, a Californio ranchero who reportedly won this land in a card game in the 1840s.

During World War Two, this stretch of Pleasanton housed two massive military installations that processed hundreds of thousands of troops.

You're passing near Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where in December 2022 scientists achieved something physicists had chased for over sixty years — the first…

The Altamont Pass wind farm you're driving through was one of the first large-scale wind energy installations on Earth.

Tracy has been a critical railroad junction since the Central Pacific laid tracks here in 1869.

You're crossing the California Aqueduct right now. Watch for the wide, concrete-lined canal passing beneath the highway.

You're driving through one of California's sharpest climate transitions.

You're now at the junction of I-5 and I-580, one of the most heavily congested interchanges in Northern California.

You're passing through the Newman area, a stretch of the west side of the San Joaquin Valley that was once one of California's major cotton-producing regions.

The reservoir you're passing is O'Neill Forebay, and it holds a distinction in American water engineering.

Los Banos takes its name from a Spanish phrase meaning the baths, referring to a creek where early Spanish soldiers from the nearby San Juan Bautista mission would stop…

Firebaugh started as a ferry crossing on the San Joaquin River, established by Andrew Firebaugh during the Gold Rush in 1854.

Kettleman City, just ahead to the southwest, became a national flashpoint for environmental justice in the early 1990s.

Mendota calls itself the cantaloupe capital of the world, but the town tells a harder story about California agriculture.

That unmistakable smell means you're passing Harris Ranch, the largest beef cattle operation on the West Coast.

Those bobbing pumpjacks in the hills to the west are pulling crude from the Coalinga oil field, one of California's oldest.

The low ridgeline to the west is the Kettleman Hills, one of the most studied geological formations in California.

Lost Hills is essentially a company town.

You're driving through the southern San Joaquin Valley across one of the most oil-rich basins in the United States.

Buttonwillow gets its name from a single buttonwillow tree that stood alone on the flat valley floor, so distinctive that the Yokuts people used it as a meeting place…

You're approaching the Grapevine, one of the most consequential stretches of highway in America.

You're crossing one of the most productive agricultural zones on Earth.

Fort Tejon, just off the interstate here, was where the United States Army tested camels as military transport animals.

In 1853, someone discovered carved into the bark of a large valley oak tree near here a brief inscription: Peter Lebeck, October 17, 1837.

You're descending through the Newhall Pass area, one of the most geologically active corridors in Southern California.