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4-8 hours
Loan Pine Lake, CA
Walk
Picnic advised
La Brea Tar Pits Dragonfly Fossils
What’s more impressive than extracting the bones of a 20,000-ton prehistoric mammoth from a tar pit? Extracting a 1-gram dragonfly, intact, from the same tar pit.
The tar pits running through Los Angeles have preserved the bones of larger prehistoric mammals like sabre-tooth tigers, giant sloths, and direwolves, but also “micro-fossils”—plants and smaller animals that help make up a more complete portrait of life in downtown Los Angeles, back when it was an ancient forest.
Of course, conditions must be perfect in order to preserve these much tinier organisms so well for so long, but those conditions were met perfectly, making the La Brea Tar Pit Museum’s exhibit of ancient insects something of a miracle. Visitors can see these prehistoric dragonflies up close before getting a behind-the-scenes look at just how fossils are discovered, extracted, and analyzed from these ancient pits.
3 hours
The Death Valley Desert, CA
Walk or Off-road vehicle
Car Snacks
Petrified Tree
4-8 hours
The Joshua Tree, CA
Walk
Picnic advised
Museum of Ancient Wonders
Nestled between a Big Lots discount store and Bambino’s Pizzeria just outside Palm Springs is a museum whose displays span 4.6 billion years of both natural and human history.
Unexpectedly located and surprisingly robust, the Museum of Ancient Wonders features over 375 artifacts on exhibits ranging from Ancient Egypt to African history to dinosaurs of the Mesozoic era. Some artifacts, like African ritual masks and sculptures, are genuine. Others—like a T. rex skull from the L.A. County Museum, King Tut’s treasures, a 2.5 billion year old cyanobacteria from N.Y. state, and “Lucy,” a 3.2 million year old hominid from Ethiopia—are either cast from the original fossils themselves or recreated by artisans with access to the originals.
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4-8 hours
Sand Mountains, CA
Walk
Picnic advised
Shiprock
What goes up must come down. But sometimes, what starts down comes up—hundreds of millions of years later.
Such is the case with Shiprock, a rock formation that formed at the bottom of a tropical sea about 250 million years ago. Over millennia, as layers of silt and decaying sea organisms were compressed and moved northward along the San Andreas Fault, the rock emerged from underground with the upthrust of the nearby Mount San Jacinto. Visiting the now-iconic rock formation offers miraculous desert views of nearby mountains as well as a chance to scale what the Cahuilla people named, accurately, kista cavel, or “sharp pointed rocks.”
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4-8 hours
The Death Valley, CA
Drive + Walk
Picnic advised
Museum of Us
From extensive collections on ancient Egyptian burial practices to grand Mayan monuments, San Diego’s Museum of Us is an anthropological playground complete
with many authentic artifacts. One exhibit in particular, however, tells a previously
untold story of an ancient Californian culture.
The museum’s Kumeyaay: Native Californians section is the first exhibit to explore California’s ancient indigenous astronomical beliefs. Having occupied Southern
California for an estimated 12,000 years, the Kumeyaay people developed an in-depth understanding of the night sky, naming many of the same constellations amateur astronomists might recognize today. Our “Big Dipper,” for example is their Selq Hatun (arm); our “Orion’s Belt” is their ‘Emuu (mountain sheep); our North Star, their Kwellyap Ketull, similarly the center of their night sky which keeps watch over all human activities. It’s a one-of-a-kind exhibit that proves some things never change.
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Know Before You Go: The rock is a very short walk from a roadside gravel parking lot located about two-hundred yards before the rock itself along Hwy 111.
What makes California an absolute playground for prehistoric artifacts? Is it because so much of the state is undeveloped desert? Is it because the entire state was once a warm, shallow sea roughly 500 million years ago? Or is it because California was home to some of the earliest human settlements in North America? If you answered ‘all of the above,’ you’re correct! Here in California, the distant past has a habit of poking its nose into the present in weird and wonderful ways—the stops on this prehistoric itinerary will show you why.
Unearthing Wonder in California
ANCIENT
CALIFORNIA
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TRIPS
EXPERIENCES
COURSES
PLACES
FOODS
STORIES
THE
WILDEST WEST
THE
WILDEST WEST
SEA OF
WONDERS
SEA OF
WONDERS
BACK
TO HUB
BACK
TO HUB
SWEET
CALIFORNIA
SWEET
CALIFORNIA
ANCIENT
CALIFORNIA
ANCIENT
CALIFORNIA
Man In The Mirror
An Afternoon At The Museum
The Slowest Ship Ever
Happy 70 Millionth Anniversary
What’s the oldest attraction at Disneyland? No, it’s not “Peter Pan’s Flight” from 1955
or “Davy Crockett’s Explorer Canoes” from 1956—it’s a petrified tree stump that’s
between 55 and 70 million years old.
The story goes that Walt and his wife Lillian were on a trip to Colorado to celebrate their 31st anniversary when they stopped in to Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument to view prehistoric remains. Walt decided, on a whim, to purchase the five-ton stump for
his wife as an anniversary gift. Nonplussed, Lillian deemed it “too large for the mantle”
(at 7.5’ in diameter, the stump once supported a 200-foot tall tree) and instead donated
it to Disneyland the following year, where it stands to this day in front of the Golden Horseshoe Saloon in Frontierland.
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Don’t Let The Prehistoric Bugs Bite
4-8 hours
The Joshua Tree, CA
Walk
Picnic advised
Coso Rock Art District
Ancient Graffiti
Long before paint, pens, and colored pencils (or any kind of pencils for that matter), prehistoric humans made art by etching shapes and figures onto rock walls. Experts
aren’t exactly sure why they did this—whether it was for fun, for spiritual purposes, or otherwise—but what is certain is that one of the most impressive displays of indigenous rock art in the Western hemisphere can be found in Inyo County, California.
The area is believed to have been inhabited as long as 13,500 years ago, making it one of the earliest human settlements in North America. While not much is known of these early humans’ day-to-day lives, one mountain range in particular is covered in clues.
The Coso Rock Art District is dotted with etchings of bighorn sheep, reptiles, humans,
and other vague or unknown symbols made by ancient peoples. While there are 100,000 individual etchings identified, there are still an unknown number that are unaccounted
for. Get out there and find a few of your own!
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4-8 hours
The Death Valley, CA
Drive + Walk
Picnic advised
Crowley Lake Columns
Mystery (Dis)solved
In 1941, the city of Los Angeles built a dam which created a lake. Over time, the lake water eroded the rock around its edge, creating a geological phenomenon called the Crowley Lake Columns—a beautiful oddity that stumped experts for decades, until fairly recently.
The more than 5,000 stone columns lining the eastern rim of Crowley Lake are about 20’ tall, appearing individually braided and connected by high arches, looking something like a bleached white forest embedded in the cliffs lining the lake.
As scientists at UC Berkeley determined in 2015, however, they’re actually the result of a 767,000-year old volcanic eruption that once covered the region in lava. As snowmelt seeped into the volcanic ash, it emerged as steam, creating a sort of “pipe” effect in the now-hardened earth.
MORE ABOUT THIS PLACE | VIEW ON GOOGLE MAPS
4-8 hours
Loan Pine Lake, CA
Walk
Picnic advised
La Brea Tar Pits
Don’t Let The Prehistoric Bugs Bite
What’s more impressive than extracting the bones of a 20,000-ton prehistoric mammoth from a tar pit? Extracting a 1-gram dragonfly, intact, from the same tar pit.
The tar pits running through Los Angeles have preserved the bones of larger prehistoric mammals like sabre-tooth tigers, giant sloths, and direwolves, but also “micro-fossils”—plants and smaller animals that help make up a more complete portrait of life in downtown Los Angeles, back when it was an ancient forest.
Of course, conditions must be perfect in order to preserve these much tinier organisms so well for so long, but those conditions were met perfectly, making the La Brea Tar Pit Museum’s exhibit of ancient insects something of a miracle. Visitors can see these prehistoric dragonflies up close before getting a behind-the-scenes look at just how fossils are discovered, extracted, and analyzed from these ancient pits.
MORE ABOUT THIS PLACE | VIEW ON GOOGLE MAPS
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“Bishop Tuff” by Kena Alto (Atlas Obscura User)
“La Brea Tar Pits” by Cynthinee / CC BY 2.0
“Shiprock” by TJ Muehleman (Atlas Obscura User)
“View from El Prado (Cabrillo Bridge) by Avoiding Regret (Atlas Obscura User)
“Coso Petroglyphs” by Kyle Magnuson / CC BY 2.0
“Petrified Tree by Ken Lun / CC BY-SA 2.0
“Museum of Ancient Wonders” by Jemmbaec (Atlas Obscura User)
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THE
WILDEST WEST
THE
WILDEST WEST
SEA OF
WONDERS
SEA OF
WONDERS
BACK
TO HUB
BACK
TO HUB
SWEET
CALIFORNIA
SWEET
CALIFORNIA
ANCIENT
CALIFORNIA
ANCIENT
CALIFORNIA
“Bishop Tuff” by Kena Alto (Atlas Obscura User)
Mono County
“Coso Petroglyphs” by Kyle Magnuson / CC BY 2.0
“Petrified Tree by Ken Lun / CC BY-SA 2.0
“Museum of Ancient Wonders” by Jemmbaec (Atlas Obscura User)
“La Brea Tar Pits” by Cynthinee / CC BY 2.0
“Shiprock” by TJ Muehleman (Atlas Obscura User)
“Shiprock” by TJ Muehleman (Atlas Obscura User)
“View from El Prado (Cabrillo Bridge) by Avoiding Regret (Atlas Obscura User)
Inyo County
Los Angeles
Anaheim
Palm Springs
Cathedral City
San Diego
Presented by
THE
WILDEST WEST
THE
WILDEST WEST
ANCIENT
CALIFORNIA
ANCIENT
CALIFORNIA
SWEET
CALIFORNIA
SWEET
CALIFORNIA
SEA OF
WONDERS
SEA OF
WONDERS
BACK
TO HUB
BACK
TO HUB
Unearthing Wonder in California
ANCIENT
CALIFORNIA
THE
WILDEST WEST
THE
WILDEST WEST
SEA OF
WONDERS
SEA OF
WONDERS
BACK
TO HUB
BACK
TO HUB
SWEET
CALIFORNIA
SWEET
CALIFORNIA
ANCIENT
CALIFORNIA
ANCIENT
CALIFORNIA
TRIPS
EXPERIENCES
COURSES
PLACES
FOODS
STORIES
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