California Facts

Larry Walters tied 42 weather balloons to his lawn chair and rose to 16,000 feet over Los Angeles.

Los Angeles's original name from 1781 was 'El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula' - a 55-character mouthful that Spanish settlers thankfully shortened over time.

During the Gold Rush in 1849, some people paid as much as $100 for a glass of water!

In 1982, a high school student from Los Angeles, California unscrambled the Rubik's Cube in 22.95 seconds.

A couple that were out walking on their property in Sierra Nevada discovered a canister containing $10 million in gold coins.

There's a road in Lancaster, CA that has grooves carved in such a way that when you drive over them at 55 MPH, they will play a part of Rossini's "The William Tell Overture."

There is a county in California called Yolo.

In 1850, only 8% of the people in California were women.

The Power Rangers Command Center was filmed at a real building called the House of the Book, located at the Brandeis-Bardin Campus in Simi Valley, California.

A neighbor's dog attacked 4-year-old Jeremy Triantafilo in his Bakersfield driveway, biting his leg and dragging him. His cat Tara streaked across the frame, body-slammed the dog, and chased it off the property. Jeremy needed 10 stitches. The security footage went viral with over 21 million views in days.

Yosemite ran a real fire waterfall for nearly a century. On summer nights, workers built a bonfire of red fir bark at the edge of Glacier Point. At 9pm, a caller shouted, "Let the Fire Fall!" Workers then pushed the embers off the cliff in a 3,000-foot cascade of flame. The Park Service banned it in 1968, calling it "as appropriate as horns on a rabbit."

The Space Shuttle Endeavour crawled through a Los Angeles neighborhood like a beached spaceship in 2012. Crews spent three days towing the retired orbiter 12 miles to a museum, felling about 400 trees to clear its wings. It paused outside Randy's Donuts, and a stock Toyota Tundra hauled the 150,000-pound shuttle across a freeway bridge as up to a million people watched.

Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in North America. In February 2024, record rain turned its lowest point into a temporary lake called Lake Manly. It stretched six miles long and three miles wide, but only a foot deep. Death Valley has no outlet to the sea, so a lake this size almost never forms. People still grabbed kayaks and paddled across it.

San Francisco's Financial District is built on top of more than 40 Gold Rush ships, possibly 70 or more. In 1849, crews abandoned their vessels to chase the gold rush, then built new streets right over the hulls. Workers hit one ship, the Rome, while digging a Muni tunnel in 1994. Every day, trains rumble through its hull.

Union Pacific's Big Boy No. 4014 is the largest steam locomotive running anywhere on Earth: 1.2 million pounds, 133 feet long. Only 8 of the 25 ever built survive, and only this one still runs. For 51 years it just sat as a park exhibit in Pomona, California. Union Pacific rebuilt it and put it back on the rails. This summer it crossed 14 states and 7,145 miles for America's 250th birthday. It is still running.

Half Dome is the granite dome in Yosemite that looks impossible to climb without ropes. It isn't. Every spring, a park crew hauls two steel cables up its steepest stretch. Every fall, they take them down. In between, permit holders haul themselves up hand over hand to the summit. Up to 300 people go up on any given day. The cables are up right now. Hikers are climbing them this week.

San Francisco's Powell Street cable car has no reverse gear and no loop to turn around on. So at the end of every run, the crew steps off. They turn the Powell car by hand on a street turntable. The 15,500-pound car swings a half circle to face the other way. Crowds gather at Powell and Market to watch. San Francisco runs the last cable car system in the world still doing this. Every run, still by hand.

Art Ingels built Indy 500-winning race cars at Kurtis Kraft. In 1956 he welded scrap tubing into a chassis in his Echo Park garage, bolted on a surplus West Bend engine, and brought it to the Rose Bowl parking lot. Other racers followed with homemade karts of their own. He is credited with building the first go-kart. One of karting's biggest US races still runs on a track across a parking lot, in Las Vegas.

Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for $50 million to remove an aerial photo of her Malibu mansion. Before the lawsuit, it had been downloaded 6 times. After: 420,000 views in a single month. She lost the case and paid $177,000 in legal fees. The phenomenon is now called the Streisand Effect.

On Labor Day 2021, five men from a halfway house spotted a burning car on Interstate 8 in Lakeside, California - and pulled over while everyone else drove past. Ken and Joan Williamson, ages 92 and 90, had been rear-ended and were trapped inside as the flames spread. The car exploded during the rescue. Every single one of them stayed.

After 31 years at Liberty Mutual, senior case manager Joy Slagel was fired the day she returned from medical leave - over a paperwork mix-up on a Disney social media investigation. A Los Angeles jury awarded her $103 million in December 2025, the largest age discrimination verdict in US history. The jury found Liberty Mutual had acted with "malice or oppression."

A California couple were walking their dog in February 2013 when the woman spotted a rusty tin can sticking out of the soil on their property. They dug it out - and found it packed with 19th-century gold coins. Eight canisters total, containing 1,427 Gold Rush-era coins dated 1847-1894. Face value: $27,980. Market value: $10 million.

Nancy Valla, Dignity Health's Chief Nursing Officer, reported expired anesthesia machines, outdated defibrillators, and unsterilized surgical instruments at her hospital. Her reward: being replaced while on medical leave. A California jury awarded her $27.5 million.

Angela Hernandez was driving Highway 1 in Big Sur when she swerved to avoid a small animal and her Jeep plunged 200 feet off the cliff to the rocky shore below. She survived the crash, broke out of her partially submerged car, and spent seven days alone on the beach - using a 10-inch hose from the wreck to siphon fresh water dripping from cliff moss. Two hikers spotted the crushed Jeep and found her alive.