Getting the flavor of … California’s historic capital, and more

California’s historic capital

In the past year, Sacramento has gotten a bad rap, said Jane Engle in the Los Angeles Times. Besides dealing with a “dysfunctional legislature,” California’s capital watched as its homeless pitched a “Depression-style tent camp” on the outskirts of town, drawing national attention to the city as an epicenter of the economic crisis. Yet Sacramento, about 80 miles northeast of San Francisco, remains one of California’s most “underrated” cities. Every corner of the city abounds with history, from the California State Railroad Museum to the “eclectic” Crocker Art Museum to John Sutter’s 1839 adobe post in Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park. Sacramento is also a “living museum of 19th-century architecture.” Old Sacramento, a 28-acre state park along the riverfront, boasts the state’s “greatest concentration of historic buildings.” The Capitol building and the old Governor’s Mansion, with their stately white exteriors and “elaborate” interiors, are stunning examples of the century’s design.

Contact: Cityofsacramento.org

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Alaska’s secluded wilderness

If you’re willing to trek to the southeastern coast of Alaska, “you’ll see more wildlife than humans,” said Adam Spangler in Men’s Journal. The Tongass wilderness comprises almost 17 million acres of unspoiled beauty and solitude, and just offshore lies the Alexander Archipelago, a 300-mile stretch of about 1,100 islands that rise steeply from the Pacific Ocean. I spent 10 days “paddling the placid waterways,” because only from the “cockpit of a kayak” can you have such a “close encounter” with a breaching orca and otherwise experience Alaska’s wildness in all its glory. The best route is a circumnavigation of Kupreanof Island, home to “one of the world’s largest temperate rain forests.” Continue south through the Wrangell Narrows and onward to the village of Kake. This far from the mainland, icebergs are nowhere in sight, but orca and humpback whales are abundant. The “gentle giants can provide not-so-gentle reminders of just how small you are in the Tongass.”

Contact: Fs.fed.us