Last year at this time, California blogger and vlogger Josh McNair was getting nervous. He had poured nearly a decade of time and energy into his travel website, California Through My Lens, along with its accompanying YouTube channel. And five years before, those successful ventures had allowed him to leave his e-commerce day job. But around the same time the pandemic was closing all things travel, McNair and his wife Amie learned they were having twins.
He held on tight, went hiking when and where possible, and created a lot of new content about outdoors adventures near his home in Riverside.
He’s traveled far and wide in this state over the past decade, and he has seen corners of California that many don’t even know exist. Here’s what McNair had to say about riding out the pandemic, along with what you should be thinking about doing right now:
I went off-roading in Joshua Tree with a couple of friends. We went and explored mines in the park. I also did some desert hiking, and hiked Mount Hollywood in Los Angeles and San Vicente Peak. The biggest trip I did was up to Yosemite to see the firefall.
What sorts of places would you recommend that people think about visiting this spring?
In the springtime, I’m always a fan of the desert. A lot of people overlook the desert, though. They think it’s a stark landscape, it’s hot, it’s not fun to be in. But some of the best sunsets and sunrises happen in the desert. There’s so much diversity and beauty if you take the chance to explore it.
Anza-Borrego State Park. That state park is gigantic and has the biggest, best slot canyon you can explore. It’ll make you feel like you’re in Utah. There are also metal sculptures throughout the desert — 30-foot tall scorpions, dinosaurs and sea serpents. It’ll take you a half day to drive and find all 120 of them.
Then in between Joshua Tree and Death Valley, there’s the Mojave National Preserve. It’s one of the difficult ones to visit for most people because it’s far away from everything. There’s no service there, no gas, no food, nothing. But the park has a lot of cool things to experience. There are huge sand dunes, if you ever wanted to climb a sand dune. Or if you don’t want the pain and suffering, you can take a picture. The Rings Trail is a beautiful stretch of desert, and toward the end, you climb up some metal rings sticking out of a rock. There are lava tubes out there, though they take a bit more time to find because they’re not well marked.
What about for people who live in the Bay Area and want to see some different areas in Northern California?
I’d recommend Point Reyes. The amount of people I know who have never gone to Point Reyes, it’s just crazy. It’s such an amazing area, and so close to San Francisco. You can keep driving the Pacific Coast Highway up to Salt Point State Park, which is incredible in its own way and much less-visited, and continue to Mendocino and Fort Bragg. That whole coastline all the way to Leggett, it’s crazy how untraveled that is, and the sheer beauty of it.
I would also put in a huge plug for the Siskiyou County area. It’s often overlooked, and it’s somewhere I’ve gone back to over and over again. It’s a little bit of a drive from San Francisco, but there’s so many waterfalls you can see and so many amazing hikes you can do. Spending a couple of days in the shadow of Mount Shasta is absolutely awe-inspiring.
If I had to pick a favorite waterfall in California, it would be McArthur-Burney Falls outside of Redding. It’s easy to drive there, and it’s one minute from the parking lot to the overlook. Any time I’m near Redding, I make a special drive and the waterfalls are always different — depending on the time of year and the time of day, you can see it in a very different light.
What about for adventurous types who want to try something really new and different?
There’s this really incredible California experience most people don’t know about. It’s over by Angels Camp in the Sonora area, and it’s called Moaning Cavern. What you can do in Moaning Cavern — and I’m not sure if it’s currently open with COVID — but you can rappel into a cave that’s the height of the Statue of Liberty. It’s not every day in California you can go do something crazy like that.
Note: Moaning Caverns Adventure Park is offering a ‘spiral tour’ that brings guests 165 feet underground on a spiral stairway built in 1922 using scrap metal from a WWI battleship. The rappel adventure is not being offered at this time.
