I have hiked many places and walked around 3 to 4 hours radius from Sacramento, most of them carry different purposes besides providing a nice scenery for us to enjoy.
One of them is Dow Wetlands Preserve owned by Dow Chemical Company, a loop trail that's surrounded by many cool interesting things and across of the park is a mesmerizing windmill plant alongside the river.
Pictures below are from the Dow Company website, explaining the motivation why they preserved most of its land.
It was a zen place to walk and very quite, so I don't recommend you to walk by yourself. Especially women or young women.
This place was a nursery before, I still see many pots were just laying there.
When I see any railroad, it reminded me of the village I grew up in west Java, Indonesia. Back then, early 1980s it was hard to get any transportation even to go to school. We had to walk 4 miles each way and some of us had to walk through railroad bridge.
If you see picture of my husband putting his ear on the metal of railroad, that was our way to find out if any train is coming towards us and believe it or not, most of the time it worked.
Watch on YouTube.
