The list keeps growing. The picks stay opinionated.
6 picks from Los Angeles.
Two hours up the mountain for three nights of proper skiing without the Mammoth drive. A lodge with a fireplace you'll actually use, après at a brewery that opened in a 1940s cabin, and snow that LA forgot exists until they're in it.
90 minutes up the 101, you turn inland and the air changes. Ojai is what happens when a California valley town stays small on purpose — orange groves, one main street, a pink sunset that earned its reputation. Two nights at the Ojai Valley Inn gets you the version of the town that spa-only weekends miss.
Two and a half hours east of LA, Joshua Tree National Park sits at the edge of the Mojave — boulders stacked like sculptures, sunsets that change the rocks every ten minutes, and a town small enough that you'll recognize the bartender on your second night. Stay at a mid-century desert lodge where the pool faces the mountains and every room opens to the rocks.
Tulum still works if you know when to be where. Early mornings at the ruins before the tour buses, lunch in town not the beach zone, a cenote swim at 3pm when everyone else is napping off mezcal. The jungle boutique hotels are real — pick one that was there before the influencer wave.
Four hours up the coast to Ventana Big Sur, where the redwoods meet the cliffs and the fog rolls in around 4pm. Two nights of silence, fire pits at sunset, a Japanese bathhouse built into the hillside. Big Sur stops being a drive-through when you give it a weekend.
90 minutes up the coast to a town that figured out how to be both a beach town and a wine town without losing either. Red tile roofs, white stucco, a harbor that still works. The American Riviera label is lazy — Santa Barbara is better than that.
