Set on a clear alpine lake, surrounded by the peaks and forests of the High Sierras, Donner Memorial State Park could be nothing more than a pleasant, scenic getaway, if it weren’t for that infamous name. Just west of the town of Truckee, the park marks the site of one of the grisliest and best-known pioneer sagas of the American West. In the fall of 1846 the Donner Party, a group of would-be immigrants to California from the Midwest, found itself snowbound in the Sierra Nevada. As supplies ran out, desperation kicked in, and those who hadn’t already perished began to cannibalize the bodies of the dead. Less than half would survive.

 At the park, history buffs can explore a museum that details the Donner ordeal and its place within the larger story of California’s settlement. A sculpted monument recognizes the pioneers who made the arduous trek, standing near the spot where families took shelter in wooden cabins. The park will get a facelift with the completion of the High Sierra Crossing Museum, slated to open this coming fall. The new center will take an updated look at the tangled legacy of pioneer expansion in the region, considering its effects on local environments and Native American communities. The park’s stunning location also makes it an ideal place to spend time outdoors. There are campsites on the shores of Donner Lake, and a light hiking trail that winds around the water. The resorts and nature areas of Lake Tahoe are also a close drive away.

 History Professor Victor Silverman, who touched on the Donner story in his book California: On-the-Road Histories, says the site’s appeal may be the powerful contrasts between landscape and history. “To be in a place like Donner Park, which is spectacularly beautiful, and to also think about the tragedy that lies hidden in the past there, is really compelling,” he says. Silverman, whose work considers the political and cultural forces that have shaped California’s society, thinks the tale of the Donner Party reveals some of the complications that inform our perceptions of the Golden State. “The California myth has always had a light side and a dark side,” he says. “These people came here to make their families prosperous, taking this adventurous journey to the west, but it turned into a horrible disaster.”

Professor Tomás Summers Sandoval Jr. peeked through the front doors of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, a gleaming white church on a steep street at the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Inside, a red light glowed over a patch of black-and-white tile, and a musty odor wafted out, the scent of decades of rites and rituals, of fading memories.

 Summers Sandoval wrote extensively about the church—a vital religious, educational, political, and social center for Spanish- speaking Catholics—in his new book, Latinos at the Golden Gate, which explores the rise of the city’s Latino community.

 The archdiocese never once let him inside, the professor notes, but the lack of access didn’t impede his research into the last remnant of a once lively Latino neighborhood. “Most of the time when you’re writing about history, the people are no longer there, the community is no longer there,” says Summers Sandoval, standing outside Guadalupe Church. “That’s history.”

 In his book, he traces the roots from the days of the Gold Rush when migrants first arrived in search of fortune. By 1871, Latin American diplomats and business elites started raising money to build a Spanish-language Catholic church to unify a diverse population, hailing from countries that had strong rivalries. “We who belong to the Spanish in this city, will never achieve strength or respectability while we do not also have unity,” they wrote in a fundraising circular.

 Founded in 1875 and rebuilt in 1912 after the city’s great quake and fire at a cost of $85,000, the Moorish Gothic style church could hold 700.

 The neighborhood around the church (bounded by Columbus Avenue, Filbert, Washington and Jones streets) grew into the Latin Quarter, a residential and commercial district catering to Spanish speakers. The church fostered solidarity, holding a unified Mass commemorating the independence days of Mexico and Chile each September. Parishioners also carried on traditions, continuing the same rituals, prayers and songs on feast days of their homelands.

 By 1950, though, Guadalupe Church began to decline. The Latino population—which more than doubled between 1945 and 1970—moved to more affordable neighborhoods such as the Mission District. The construction of the nearby Broadway Tunnel displaced some residents and reduced attendance, and Chinatown encroached, transforming the blocks around the church. Yet even when Latino families moved out of the neighborhood or into the suburbs, many maintained strong ties, returning to Guadalupe Church for baptisms, confirmations, first communions and first confessions.

 Declining membership brought the closure of Guadalupe Church in 1991, and the building eventually housed St. Mary’s School for 15 years. The space is now vacant, and efforts by the Archdiocese to sell the historical landmark met resistance from activists who want to preserve the church for use by the Latino community.

 From the front steps, there’s a view of the Bay Bridge and the tip of the Transamerica Pyramid, and the street below hums with the sound of cable cars rolling past. The bells are gone from the church’s twin towers, but a stunning mosaic of the patron saint remains on the façade above the front doors, in a red gown and blue mantle adorned with stars, streaming rays of sunshine—the same saint that generations of San Francisco Latinos venerated here.

 The church, says Summers Sandoval, remains a reminder of the people’s struggles, “the result of the success of early century immigrants to create a home for themselves in the city, a place they could claim as their own.”

How to tell the story of Silicon Valley—land of entrepreneurial visionaries, booms and busts, and the quest for machines to extend the farthest reaches of the human mind? For Ashlee Vance ’00, a writer covering tech for more than a decade, a good place to start is across the street from his house in Mountain View, Calif., at the Computer History Museum. The building is part of the story; here once were headquarters for SGI, maker of hardware and graphics innovations that enabled work on the first Star Wars films and provided sought-after speed for Wall Street trading.

 “Computing moves so fast that people don’t take time to stop and document it,” says Vance, author of Geek Silicon Valley and writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Striving for the new new thing means that there’s a tendency to chew through the old stuff and spit it out. But the museum offers a kaleidoscope history of technology (2,000-plus years and counting) and shows how the ways we work and play have been rewritten by computing, with design aesthetics that range from a wooden abacus to steampunk to the Jetsons. There’s the big hardware from the pre-digital (and even pre-vacuum tube) age, starting with Charles Babbage’s “Difference Engine No. 2,” a massive contraption filled with metal gears designed in the 1830s. (It was only built last decade, to see if it would actually work. It does.) Another hefty device, Herman Hollerith’s desk-sized “Electric Tabulating System,” used punched cards to compile data for the 1890 U.S. Census.

Think colossal for IBM’s SAGE system, built in the 1950s (at the cost of $94 billion in today’s dollars) to provide warning against a Soviet nuclear attack. It required hundreds of operators—some who spent mind-numbing hours staring at a screen, watching, waiting. Thankfully, there was a built-in ashtray.

 Think cool (including Freon) for the Cray-1, both the fastest computer on the planet after it was finished in 1976, with 60 miles of hand-threaded wire inside, and “the world’s most expensive loveseat,” thanks to a leather bench wrapping around the outside. “It has so much more character than computers today,” Vance says.

 It’s the story threads that make the museum displays especially compelling, Vance says. Early work on enormous scale wouldn’t have been done without massive government funding. But standing on the shoulders of those literal giants are the smaller machines which, together with a DIY attitude and a late-’60s desire to expand the possibilities of human experience, led to the first virtual reality goggles (1969) and, through the Homebrew Computer Club, the Apple I.

 Don’t miss the game room. Start with the first Pong machine—a curiosity when it was installed in a bar, “but this kicked off the videogame revolution.” That made Atari into the fastest-growing company ever. They’re not any more. But “people tend to underestimate video games,” Vance says. “They push limits of software, of graphics, of silicon.”

 The seemingly limitless realm of the Cloud is a place we know well enough now—though where is it? Here’s an early server rack, the machine sagging in the middle, that belonged to a fledgling Google. “They had to use cheap hardware, and the software had to make up for when a disk drive or chip would fail.”

 What would Vance imagine for the next wing of the museum? The interplay of hardware and software in what we drive—or drives itself, especially under electric power; and the coming revolution in robotics. Plus, he says, “Down the road is a company working on a flying car.”

The Farallon Islands, a windy string of rocks 30 miles off the coast from San Francisco, might seem like an odd place to call a “second home.” Boasting just a single research station, the remote islands are only accessible by infrequent and often choppy boat trips. But Associate Professor of Biology Nina Karnovsky isn’t fazed by the rugged conditions.

 “It’s one of my favorite places in the world,” she says.

 Home to the largest seabird colony in the continental U.S., the Farallones are a magnet for ocean wildlife. In summer, seemingly every inch of the place is claimed by thousands of nesting birds fiercely guarding their chicks. During the winter, noisy elephant seals crowd the beaches to give birth to their pups. Meanwhile, great white sharks hunt in the waters offshore. In other months, blue and humpback whales can be spotted making their annual migrations along the coast. Karnovsky made her first trip to the islands when she was just out of college, to work on a project to record shark sightings.

 She’s returned several times over the years to observe how seabirds such as auklets and gulls respond to changing conditions in the ocean. Perched at the top of the marine food web, these birds are impacted by everything from climate events like El Niño to pollution from plastics and oil spills.

 “On my second trip out there, during a seabird breeding season, I realized that these birds are just such powerful indicators of what’s going on in the ocean. That really turned me on to the idea of using these indicator species in my work, and that’s exactly what I do now,” she says.

 A National Wildlife Refuge since 1969, the Farallones are closed to the public, and scientists and students are only allowed for temporary visits. Still, wildlife-lovers can catch a close view of the action from birding and whale-watching boats that sail from cities in the Bay Area to circle around the islands.

 “If you’re not susceptible to sea-sickness, you can go out there and see them,” Karnovsky says.

 Karnovsky, who has spent over a year’s worth of time on the Farallones between her different stays, hopes to ship out again soon. In recent years she’s even been able to send some of her students to the islands to gather data for their own summer research projects and senior theses.

 “Looking back, I can see it was one of the turning points in my life, where I discovered something that was really exciting. It’s nice that I’ve been able to share that with my students.”

As the 1950s came to an end, Jonas Salk was looking to open a top-flight research center. The man who developed the polio vaccine wanted a site where scientists would be inspired by their surroundings.

Today, standing at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, you can see what a perfect spot he picked.

 Sitting atop a rocky cliff in La Jolla, the world-renowned facility looks out prominently on the Pacific Ocean, offering a scenic vista that’s as dazzling as any in San Diego. On this mid-January day, the sun is out, the surf is glimmering and two hikers are walking leisurely along the canyon trails below. The open, airy design of the institute accentuates the calm of the horizon.

 “It’s an extraordinary place,” says Mary Walshok ’64, who knows the spot well. She works right across the street, as associate vice chancellor for public programs at UC San Diego. “This space speaks most deeply to the character of this region.”

 A sociology professor and sought-after expert on San Diego’s economy, Walshok is my personal guide on a tour of Torrey Pines Mesa, a high-wattage biotech cluster that stretches about three miles along the La Jolla bluffs. She knows just about everything about the area, from the history of city land deals to where the eucalyptus trees on the hillsides come from, and her earthy enthusiasm and humor enliven the journey.

As Walshok explains in a new book she has co-authored, Invention & Reinvention: The Evolution of San Diego’s Innovation Economy, Torrey Pines Mesa has been a catalyst for the region’s prosperity in recent decades, as the city has refashioned itself from a military metropolis to a thriving hub of science and technology innovation. The mesa is home to such heavyweights as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Qualcomm, General Atomics, the Scripps Research Institute, and the new star on the block, the J. Craig Venter Institute.

 Walshok proudly notes that Pomona’s Roger Revelle ’29—a UC San Diego pioneer and onetime director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography— played a pivotal role in the emergence of Torrey Pines Mesa in the ’50s and ’60s.

 The Salk Institute, founded in 1960, is largely regarded as the most iconic of the mesa’s inhabitants. It was designed by famed architect Louis Kahn, who deftly captured Salk’s vision of a transcendent place for thought and discovery. At the center of the site is a courtyard separating two uniquely shaped, symmetric structures— six-story laboratory buildings with dramatic views of the ocean. A narrow channel of water flows through the middle of the courtyard. The place gives off the vibe of a scientific sanctuary, encouraging creativity and reflection.

 The inviting look embodies the architectural character of many of the spacious centers in this biotech cluster, says Walshok. The idea is to create public spaces that are welcoming and open, integrating nature and science and art. These are not labs where researchers work in darkened isolation; rather, the science campuses are popular sites for public receptions and concerts, Walshok says.

 Down the road, at the Scripps Research Institute, a courtyard features a row of bamboo trees, a large open space and a concert hall that’s one of the best in San Diego, Walshok says. Nearby, UCSD houses the acclaimed La Jolla Playhouse, and across the street from that is the new bluff-top campus of the J. Craig Venter Institute. The $37- million, 45,000-square-foot structure officially opened in November, although parts of it are still being completed. Venter is the La Jolla biologist who cracked the human genetic code, putting him on a bevy of magazine covers.

 As Walshok and I walk around the place, we look out at the ocean and the eucalyptus groves in the canyon below. The Venter Institute looks clean and contemporary, evoking an elegant, techno feel; its design features an open courtyard and lots of glass, wood and concrete.

 The aesthetic is very 21st century, notes Walshok. “It’s not like European-style architecture … It’s like what you would see in Hong Kong or Shanghai.”

 The distinct architectural touches that flavor Torrey Pines Mesa add an interesting element to this biotech nexus along the San Diego coast. A beacon of brainpower, it is another symbol of the state’s dynamic evolution. “California continues to invent itself,” says Walshok, “and not just in Silicon Valley.”

Early the weekend before Thanksgiving, two SUVs loaded with junior geology majors, one professor, camping equipment and burrito fixings hit the road. The small caravan drives about three hours southeast, traversing interstate, state, county and local roads until finally, the asphalt ends.

 They head down Fish Creek Wash, a dry riverbed winding its way through dramatically deep stone canyons.

 Destination? The final exam for Sedimentology. In the Split Mountain area of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park—California’s largest state park and second largest state park in the continental U.S.—students witness the geologic history of the arrival of the Colorado River and the development of the San Andreas Fault as Baja California was ripped away from the North American Plate, opening the Gulf of California, five million years ago.

 “The importance of sedimentary rocks is that they are the Earth’s history,” says Associate Professor of Geology Robert Gaines. “What’s really cool about Pomona College is instead of having to look at some dusty old samples in boxes, we can go camping, and students can actually put their hands on a really complicated succession and try to figure out what was happening during the deposition of these strata, to reconstruct the ancient environments that were present by looking at signatures in the rocks.”

 While the area Gaines and his students explore—which includes wind caves, slot canyons and fossil records like Ice Age mammal footprints—is only accessible to those driving high-clearance vehicles, Anza-Borrego is full of well-marked trails (including part of the Pacific Crest Trail) in its diverse 900 square miles extending from below sea level to 8,000 feet. The park is located mostly in eastern San Diego County, and first-timers can start at the Visitor Center in Borrego Springs for information on the natural history and highlights of the area. Consider visiting in February or March to experience the dramatic blooming of desert wildflowers like the chuparosa, chinchweed and dune evening primrose.

 Call the Park’s wildflower hotline at (760) 767-4684,for updates on the seasonal blooms, or visit www.abdnha.org for more information.

The morning sun has only begun to tint the sky when Heather Williams breaks through thin shrubs to reach the gravelly bank of the Santa Ana River, which is running cool, clear and fast. Williams has come here often over the past two years, mainly as part of her academic research, but also because she finds the site enchanting at the break of day.

She also is drawn by the juxtaposition. Egrets, ducks and other birds wing above as unseen creatures rustle in the dry grass, a bucolic backdrop to the homeless people sleeping in tents deep in the brush, and the distant rush of commuters barreling down unseen roadways. The air carries a tinge of burning garbage as well, from breakfast campfires near the covered-over Tequesquite Landfill that Williams walked past to get here.

 “This is here, this is accessible to us, even when we think that we are surrounded by nothing more than big box stores and concrete and freeways and noise,” says Williams, a professor of politics who teaches, among other courses, Global Politics of Food and Agriculture. “For me it’s a metaphor for our ability to access nature in unexpected places. And it presents us with a choice for the future.”

 For all the natural beauty of this stretch of river, the spot Williams has picked out cuts through suburban neighborhoods three miles southwest of downtown Riverside. The Santa Ana, surprisingly, is the largest river in Southern California, traveling nearly 100 miles from its source on Mount San Gorgonio through the Inland Empire and Santa Ana Canyon—where the 91 Freeway cuts through the mountains to Orange County—and on through to the Pacific at the Newport Beach-Huntington Beach border.

 This geography represents past and future, and the centrality of water to human settlement—people have lived along the waterway for 9,000 years. And  it is the subject of Williams’ book-in progress, River Underground: The Secret Life of the Santa Ana, which looks at the modern evolution of the river from early flood-control efforts through its present condition, amid the region’s expanding population and conflicting demands.

 It’s a convoluted past for this inconsistent ribbon of water. The Santa Ana has raged in massive floods and all but disappeared in droughts. It has had its riverbed paved in sections. And it has been the focus of political battles over who gets to use its water, how it should be managed and the role it plays in regional recreation.

 In fact, there are scores of free access points along the river, from the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains to Williams’ favorite spot here amid the cottonwoods to where the Santa Ana reaches Orange County’s emblematic beaches. More than 40 miles of developed hiking and biking trails along its length offer oases of nature—and a glimpse of the original landscape—amid the SoCal sprawl.

 Oddly, Williams was drawn to studying the Santa Ana River through a research project she did in Peru on the political overlays to human migration and boundaries, both natural and national. But the local Peruvians wanted to discuss water quality and mechanisms to collect statistical portraits of the health of local rivers.

 That started an evolution of thought that led Williams to wonder about the health and history of her local watershed, and the demands that will shape its future.

 For Williams, this spot along the river represents what has become a consuming area of academic inquiry and a place to generate and share ideas, as she did last summer with a “dream team” of summer research assistants, including Tara Krishna ’14, Clare Anderson ’15 and Minerva Jimenez, Cal State Fullerton ’14. But it also has become a temporary refuge, a place where, on a spring day, “you would see the willows in all their glory. And you would hear the wind coming through the cottonwoods.”

More than a decade ago, when Geology Professor Eric Grosfils first started bringing students to Amboy Crater in the Mojave Desert, he dreaded the last stretch of the long trip, each time hoping the rough dirt road and unpaved parking lot had not been washed out in a storm.

 Fortunately, the path always was intact and the three-hour bus ride always worth it, Grosfils says, because the strikingly symmetrical cinder cone volcano offers such an accessible, boots-on way to teach introductory students about the basics of volcanology.

 Since then, new amenities have been put in place—restrooms, a shade spot and, best of all, paved roads and parking—clearing the way for you, too, to more comfortably visit this desert wonder located right off an old section of Route 66. Reaching the cinder cone simply requires a relatively flat, mile-long hike, and a convenient breach on the west side of the crater wall makes the steep path up to the rim a bit more manageable for those who are in less than impeccable shape. “You can go into the crater and crawl around,” says Grosfils. “It’s fresh. It’s young. The lava flow looks great. The cinder cone is completely intact.”

 Grosfils takes students to the crater during the first few weeks of his introductory geology class, which he teaches with a planetary emphasis. The idea is to give them access to a very obvious volcano that they can roam and get a sense of the scale of things.

 In the class, a lot of numbers are thrown around, Grosfils says, and the visit helps put the figures into context. If the students are huffing and puffing while climbing up the 250-foot-high Amboy Crater, and they know the massive Olympus Mons volcano on Mars is in the ballpark of 14 miles high, “it means something.” “This is a field trip that’s really about observation,” he explains. “It’s about finding out what you can see in the field and building hypotheses from that—things that are testable. … I want the students to be asking questions about what they’re seeing. I want their observations to drive the hypotheses about the processes that go on.”

 While up on the rim, he asks the students to look out at the surrounding desert plain and imagine what they would have seen if they had been standing there watching when Amboy first erupted. He has them estimate the thickness of the basaltic lava flow, and later in the term they consider what shape it would take under the conditions of another planet. On Mars, for example, with all other conditions the same, the lighter gravity would most likely lead to a much taller, though less extensive, volcanic flow.

 For your trip, you can get a little more down to Earth, taking notice of the two nested areas inside the volcano, evidence of two smaller and later eruptions. You also can figure out the direction of the prevailing winds by noticing the absence of sand on one side, a wind streak (also visible to orbiting spacecraft, like similar features on Mars) that forms on the downwind side of the volcano. Amboy Crater’s relative youth—Grosfils says that recent estimates put it at anywhere from 7,000 to around 80,000 years old—makes it a great, unblemished example of a cinder cone volcano.

 But even if you hear explosions and rumbling, rest assured the dormant volcano is probably not the culprit. The boom-boom-boom is likely coming from the Marine Corps bombing range to the southwest, so, along with taking the usual desert heat precautions, make sure you know where you roam.