I couldn’t help it. In the course of scouting out great adventures for the Los Angeles Times’ guide to essential destinations in Baja, California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, I found myself compiling a personal top 10.

Of our 101 best West Coast experiences, these 10 resonate most for me. I’d recommend them to just about any California newbie and I’d grab at a chance to visit them again — some for beauty, others for the stories they tell or the memories they tie together.

Rady Shell, San Diego

I have a hard time imagining a more pleasant place to see an outdoor concert. Well, maybe the Red Rocks Amphitheater outside Denver. But on the West Coast? I’ll take this sleek bayside shell in downtown San Diego. And I’ll try not to be resentful that nobody thought of this while I lived down there.

Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, California

What are we going to do about Highway 1? Since that Pacific Coast road was built on the slopes of Big Sur in the 1930s, we’ve treasured it. But as any acrophobe, geologist or engineer could tell you, those slopes crumble and slide relentlessly. Year after year, mountains are moved to keep the two-lane road navigable. Whenever I worry about the highway, I think of Deetjen’s, which is basically a roadside time capsule clad in weathered wood. It opened about the time the highway did and won over generations of road- trippers with its rustic rooms and restaurant. Before Helmuth Deetjen died in 1972, he set up a nonprofit to keep the place running. I’ve been stopping there since the 1980s. You have to call to make a reservation. And when you get there, expect paper-thin walls along with the Norwegian woodwork, the crackle of the fireplace and the portrait of Deetjen on the wall. It’s a priceless place. And Nepenthe and the Henry Miller Memorial Library are just down the road.

Yosemite Valley, California

Does this need explaining? Probably not. If you’re arriving from the south, you emerge from the long, dark Wawona Tunnel to see El Capitan and Half Dome looming above a green, wet world of its own. Waterfalls roar left and right. The valley stretches for 7 miles, framed by granite walls that Ansel Adams shot and Alex Honnold climbed. The Merced River meanders through. Even if you don’t have $600 to spend a night in the Ahwahnee Hotel, you can pop by for a snack, gaze up at painted rafters that go back to 1927 and warm yourself by one of the roaring fireplaces.

Venice Beach, Los Angeles

When you hit this beach at the right time on the right day, it feels so emblematic of Southern California. On my last visit, the sun was just setting. My wife and I checked out the skateboarders, chatted with artists selling work along the sidewalk and passed by the Shul on the Beach (aka Pacific Jewish Center), an Orthodox synagogue where worshippers were just gathering for a Friday night Shabbat meal.

Whales of Baja’s lagoons

It’s one thing to watch migrating gray whales off the Southern California coast, standing at the rail of a big boat, looking for spouts in the distance and perhaps drawing within 100 yards. It’s something else when you’re in a panga on the waters of a southern Baja lagoon — usually Ojo de Liebre or San Ignacio. These immense creatures get so close sometimes, it feels intimate. And maybe a little scary.

Ferry Building and waterfront, San Francisco

I’m trying to think of a more successful architectural resurrection than San Francisco’s Ferry Building. Picture that 1898 waterfront building in the 1920s, when there was no Bay Bridge and no Golden Gate Bridge and up to 50,000 people per day were commuting by ferry. The Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street was the center of the Bay Area’s nervous system. Then the bridges went up, commuters abandoned the ferries, the building was rehabbed into ugly offices and decades passed. Finally, after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, San Francisco leaders launched a plan to revive the building. It reopened in 2003 as a foodie-oriented restaurant and retail space, a thousand times more interesting than the souvenir shops of Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39. Apart from the food, it’s got great views of the Bay Bridge. (And with luck, the bridge’s nightly light show, which went dark last year, will resume in early 2025.) I think of the Ferry Building and the Golden Gate Bridge as the bookends of the waterfront.

Hidden Valley, Joshua Tree National Park

I’m not a rock climber or a boulderer. But I’m a sucker for sunrises and sunsets in the desert. And when that golden-hour light hits the jumbled boulders in Hidden Valley, it’s hard to resist.

Pike Place Market, Seattle

This is always the first place I want to go in Seattle. I walk past the mirrored bar of the Athenian restaurant, where my buddy Rick and I had beers in 1986, my first time in town. I go down below to make sure the bubble-gum wall is still in place. I mourn at the spot where the newsstand used to be. I listen to buskers. I stick my head in the anarchist collective bookshop (Left Bank Books), which has somehow lasted 51 years. And like every other tourist, I linger near the fishmongers so I can see them flinging fish and hollering at each other.

Capilano Suspension Bridge Park, Vancouver

On my first visit, a few years ago, it was raining and the park was packed. I wondered if the bridge would be closed. Nope. Open, and prone to jiggle as I stood 230 feet above the Capilano River, surrounded by tall trees and mist. When I returned in February, it was snowing, the park was nearly empty and the bridge was still open. The vibe was part “Twin Peaks,” part “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

Badwater, Death Valley

Badwater is hot and dry enough to kill you pretty quickly, but as long as you have water to drink, shade and a way out, you’ll probably live and have a story to tell. On my first visit, a summer day about 30 years ago, Death Valley was even hotter than usual, around 115 degrees. The power had gone out at our Furnace Creek hotel. Rather than crowd into the marginally cooler hotel pool with scores of children, I headed with my wife and friends for the vast, flat, salty, dry lake floor of Badwater with a Wiffle ball and bat. The game didn’t last long, but there are photos: Except for our 20th-century leisurewear, we looked like biblical figures in the process of being turned to pillars of salt. So last year, when rains washed out roads, closed Death Valley National Park for months, refilled the lake bed and transformed the basin into a mirror, I was eager to get back there.

I got to Badwater for sunrise and came back at sunset. No Wiffle ball. Just the big sky, the mountains reflected in the lake and a handful of fellow travelers in at water’s edge. I don’t know if I’ll ever see that lake again, but now I have two layers of Badwater memories to carry with me.