California Through My Lens
Photo-forward California travel guides, hikes, road trips, city guides and national parks.
Visit californiathroughmylens.com
About California Through My Lens
California Through My Lens is a personal travel blog run by Josh McNair with support from his wife and, more recently, their twins. Josh started the site over a decade ago to document his outdoor adventures and photography across California, and the project has grown to more than 1,500 posts and over 20 million global pageviews. The site collects hikes, restaurants, road trips, national park guides and city guides, and it also publishes videos on a linked YouTube channel. Posts are illustrated with the author s own photography and occasional video embeds to help readers plan trips.
A relentlessly local love letter to California, written in straightforward, practical prose. The posts read like a friend who knows every side road and sunset viewpoint, mixing long, detailed guides with clear logistics and lots of on-the-trail photography. The Joshua Tree guide we sampled is thorough and longform, packed with route notes, times and context, and the site includes weekend itineraries, hidden spots and full road-trip sequences. It also pairs well with Josh s YouTube work and a site map of posts, and it stays active at about one new guide every month or two, making it useful for trip planning without being overwhelming.
Where They Travel
california
Pros
- Extensive, California-specific guides and itineraries
- Photo-rich posts with embedded video
- More than 1,500 practical adventure posts
- Clear, first-person, easy-to-follow writing
Cons
- Ads served via an ad network on pages
- Updates roughly once a month
How Popular Is California Through My Lens?
- Tranco traffic rank286,497
- Majestic Million rank106,328
- Open PageRank5.3 / 10
- YouTube subscribers314K
- Best-of lists1