The city has cosy cabins, scenic walks and the chance to explore connected islands.
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Inverness is a gorgeous city(Image: Getty)
If you’re on the hunt for a snug winter weekend escape, the UK offers an abundance of options. With so many stunning locations to choose from, it can be quite the task to decide.
From vibrant cities to ancient woodlands and charming villages, the UK is brimming with beautiful spots. However, one location has been singled out as the ideal winter retreat.
The team at Go Outdoors have recently unveiled their top choices for a winter escapade, and the favourite is a delightful blend of urban and rural attractions that cater to all tastes.
Using data on snowfall, woodland walks, cosy pubs with log fires, and cabins, they’ve ranked the top UK adventure destinations – and the Scottish city of Inverness has emerged as the champion.
Boasting over 200 winter cabins and a wealth of breathtaking walking trails, it’s not hard to see why Inverness clinched the top spot.
One of the most favoured walks is the Inverness Castle and River Circular, which guides you on a stunning 4.5km journey through some of Scotland’s most majestic landscapes, reports the Express.
During your hour-and-a-half stroll, you’ll also pass by the iconic Inverness Castle, nestled in the city centre.
Inverness even provides the opportunity for island hopping – without ever having to leave the city.
The Ness Islands are a chain of islands in the river, all interconnected by beautiful Victorian-era footbridges.
You can start on one side of the riverbank and end up on the other, meandering through the islands and spotting sculptures along the way. It’s the perfect way to spend a wintry day exploring.
Though Inverness is a small city that’s easy to navigate, it also serves as an excellent base for exploring the wider Highlands.
Just beyond the city limits, you’ll find the renowned Loch Ness, home to its elusive, legendary creature – perhaps you’ll be the lucky one to spot her.
Keiko Agena likes to create moments of coziness — not just on Sundays, but whenever she possibly can.
“Oh, there’s my rice cooker,” she says when she hears the sound in her Arts District home. “We’re making steel-cut oatmeal in the rice cooker, which by the way, is a game changer. I used to have to baby it and watch it, but now I can just put it in there and forget it.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
The 52-year-old actor, who played music-loving bestie Lane Kim in the beloved series “Gilmore Girls,” delights in specific comforts like a bowl of warm oats, talking about Enneagram numbers and watching cooking competitions with her husband, Shin Kawasaki.
“It sounds so simple, but I look forward so much to spending time on the couch,” Agena says with a laugh.
It is time that she’s intentional about protecting, especially amid her kaleidoscope of projects. Over the last couple of years, Agena starred in Lloyd Suh’s moving play “The Chinese Lady” in Atlanta, acted in Netflix’s “The Residence,” showcased her artwork in her first feature exhibit, “Hep Tones” (some of her ink and pencil drawings are still for sale), and performed regularly on that L.A. improv circuit. And her work endures with “Gilmore Girls,” which turns 25 this year. Agena narrated the audiobook for “Meet Me at Luke’s,” a guide that draws life lessons from the series, and is featured in the upcoming “Gilmore Girls” documentary “Drink Coffee, Talk Fast.”
She shares with us her perfect Sunday in L.A., which begins before sunrise.
5 a.m.: Morning solitude
I like to be up early-early, like 5 a.m. I like that feeling of everything being quiet. I’ll go into the other room and do Duolingo on my phone. I am a little addicted to social media, so the Duolingo is not just to learn Japanese, but also to keep me from scrolling. Like, if I’m going to do something on my phone, this is better for me. I think my streak is 146. Shin is Japanese, from Oyama. So I’ve been meaning to learn Japanese for a while. For him and his mom.
Then I’ll do [the writing practice] Morning Pages. I don’t know when I learned about Julia Cameron’s book [“The Artist’s Way”] — probably around 2000. I know a lot of people do it handwritten, but I’m a little paranoid about people, like, finding it after I die. So if I have it on my computer and it’s password protected, I can be really honest.
Then a lot of times, I’ll go back to bed. Shin, as a musician, works at night, and so he wakes up a lot later. So I’ll fall back asleep and wake up with him.
9 a.m.: Gimme that bread
I don’t do coffee anymore because it’s a little too tough for my system, but I’ll walk with Shin to Eightfold Coffee in the Arts District. It’s tiny but very chill. Then we’re going to Bliss Bakery inside the Little Tokyo Market Place. We get these tapioca bread balls. If you make any kind of sandwich that you would normally make, but use that bread instead, it ups the game. It’s life-changing. The Little Tokyo Market Place is not fancy or anything, but it has everything that you would want. There’s Korean food. They have a little sushi place in there. You can get premade Korean banchan and hot food in their hot food section. They also have a really good nuts section. It’s just one big table with all these nuts, just piles and piles.
10 a.m.: Nature without leaving the city
We’ll go to Los Angeles State Historic Park near Chinatown. I like that place just because it’s very accessible. Like, they have accessible bathrooms and I’m always checking out whether a place has good bathrooms. We call it Flat Park because it’s a great walk. Like, you’re not really out in nature, but there’s a lot of greenery. You can take your shoes off and at least touch grass for a second.
11:30 a.m.: Lunch and TV cooking shows
One of my favorite salad-sandwich combos is at Cafe Dulce in Little Tokyo. A Korean cheesesteak and a kale salad. That’s always like a — bang, bang — good combo. So we might go there or Aloha Cafe, though it’s not fully open on Sundays. But I love it because I grew up in Hawaii. They have this great Chinese chicken salad and spam musubi and other Hawaiian food that is so good.
We’ll bring home food and watch something. Cooking competition shows are my cream of the crop. My favorite right now is “Tournament of Champions” because it’s blind tasting. To me, that’s the best way to do it. “The Great British Bake Off” is Shin’s favorite. He loves the nature and the accents as much as the actual cooking. He just loves the vibe, the slow pace of the whole thing.
I’m such a TV girl. I love spending time on the couch and eating a meal and watching something that’s appetizing with my favorite person in the world. I’m lucky because I get to do that a lot.
2 p.m.: Browse the aisles
I’ll go to this bookstore called Hennessey + Ingalls. I love art and architecture and design, but you can’t always buy these massive books. But you can go into this bookstore and look at them and it’s always chill.
If I have time, I’ll walk around art supply stores. Artist & Craftsman Supply is a good one. I’ll look at pens, pencils, stickers, tape, washi tape, different kinds of paper, charcoals. In my art, I try to find things that aren’t meant for that particular purpose, like little things in a hardware store that I’ll use it in a different way.
5 p.m.: Downtown L.A. in its glory
We really love to walk the Sixth Street Bridge. It’s architecturally beautiful and they’re building a huge park over there, so we’ll walk around and check it out, like, ‘Which trees are they planting? Can you see?’ We sort of dream about how it’s coming together. But the other beautiful thing about that walk is that if you go at sunset and you walk back toward downtown, it’s just gorgeous. Los Angeles doesn’t have the most majestic skyline, but it’s so picturesque in that moment.
6:30 p.m.: Cornbread and Enneagrams
I’ll head to the Park’s Finest in Echo Park. It’s Filipino barbecue. It’s just so savory and rich and a special hang. Their cornbread is really good. Oh, and the coconut beef, but I’m trying to eat less beef. They have a hot link medley. Oh my gosh, just looking at this menu right now, my mouth is watering. OK, I’ll stop.
One of my favorite things to do is ask friends about their Enneagram number. So the idea of sitting with friends over a good meal and asking them a bunch of personal questions about their childhood and what motivates them and what their parents were like and what their greatest fear is and then figure out what their Enneagram number is? That is top-tier activity for me.
9 p.m.: Rally for improv
Because I get up so early, if 9 o’clock, I’m ready to go to sleep. But I am obsessed with improv, so on my ideal day, there’d be a show to do. There’s this place called World’s Greatest Improv School in Los Feliz. It’s tiny and they just opened a few years ago, but the vibe there is spectacular.
Then there’s another place where my heart is so invested in now called Outside in Theatre in Highland Park. Tamlyn Tomita and Daniel Blinkoff created it together and not only is the space gorgeous — I mean, they built it from scratch — they have interesting programming there all the time. They’re so supportive of communities that are not seen in mainstream art spaces. It’s my favorite place. Sometimes I’ll find myself in their lobby till 12 o’clock at night. The kind of people I like to hang around are the people that hang out in that space.
11 p.m.: Turn on the ASMR and shut down
I am firmly an ASMR girl and I have been for years. I have to find something to watch that will slow my brain down. Then it’s pretty consistent. I don’t last very long once I turn something on. My eyelids get heavy and it chills me out.
I was in awe of the cavern’s striations and white globs of minerals dripping from its ceiling. The experience stuck with me, enough that in this week’s Wild, we’re exploring more about the geology of our local mountains.
And we’re in luck! This week, the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park debuted “Unearthed: Raw Beauty,” an exhibit of rare earth minerals, including several from Southern California.
Visitors will see blue cap tourmaline, crystals named after their blue tops, and other tourmaline crystals mined in San Diego. They’re estimated to be 100 million years old!
Tourmaline grows in Southern California inside rocks called pegmatites, which are “basically granite that had time to grow large crystals. These rocks form when hot magma cools and hardens into solid rock inside Earth’s crust,” according to the museum. (We’ll talk more about pegmatites in a minute.)
While at the opening night event for the exhibit, I spoke to two experts to better understand all that rocks and rolls around us: Aaron Celestian, the curator of mineral sciences at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Kriss Leftwich, collections manager of mineral sciences at the Natural History Museum.
My main question for them was: How can hikers better understand what they’re seeing and hiking over and around?
Let’s dive into what I learned, which I’ve compiled for you into a brief beginner’s guide. It rocks!
A lone hiker takes in sweeping views of the Santa Monica Mountains at Eagle Rock along the Backbone Trail in Topanga State Park.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
What minerals can be observed in the Santa Monica Mountains?
The sediment and minerals of the Santa Monica Mountains were formed over millions of years, including through a process of ocean transgression and regression, Celestian said.
As Earth went through its natural periods of warming and cooling, ice sheets would melt and grow, causing sea levels to rise and fall. When sea levels rose, water moved further inland, covering ancient beaches and sandstone in layers of marine sediment, including shells and skeletons of sea animals. When the sea levels would fall, the water would recess, causing more beach material and sediments close to the shore to layer over the marine layers, he said.
Parts of the Santa Monicas were previously a beach-type environment that eventually developed into sandstone that we see while out hiking, Celestian said.
As this geologic report on the Santa Monica Mountains points out, “Sediments that were deposited in marine settings millions of year (sic) ago now sit high in ridges and peaks of the park as a result of tectonic forces and the uplift.”
The sunset seen from the Ray Miller Backbone Trail in Point Mugu State Park.
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
The Santa Monica Mountains were formed over millions of years through a process called “compression,” where tectonic plates force land upward, and tectonic folding, where the rock bends instead of breaking.
Celestian said the Santa Monica Mountains originally ran along the coastline, but “they started to rotate horizontally … [because] there’s a fault that actually rotated the Santa Monicas perpendicular.”
“They call them the Transverse Ranges because they got twisted,” he added.
Because of the diversity of our mountains and how they were formed, geologists (or lucky hikers) might find surprising micro-environments with unexpected minerals.
One way these can be formed is through the cooling process of a magma chamber. “It’s releasing lots of water, and that water is like a convection cell, and it circulates through it, and it concentrates metals in various areas. So you can get these little pockets of random crystals that you’ve never seen before because of how the water cooled,” deep underground, Celestian said.
While out hiking recently in the Santa Monica Mountains, he found lots of invertebrate fossils at the top of a mountain. And then he found a “huge pocket of quartz underneath a tree” with nothing else around it, likely due to a geological process that developed a micro-environment.
A close look at a tourmaline on feldspar on display at the “Unearthed: Raw Beauty” exhibit at the Natural History Museum.
(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
What types of minerals might we notice while hiking in the San Gabriels?
As you hike in the San Gabriels, you may notice striations in rock walls, like large white rock with little black veins. That was likely a quartz-rich rock with mica, a flaky, “very glittery” mineral that will resemble the texture of eye shadow, Leftwich said.
“When it’s black, it’s biotite, and when it’s purple, it’s lepidolite,” Leftwich said, adding there are several other types of mica.
If lucky, hikers might observe pegmatite, which is essentially a rock with large crystals forming within it, she said.
Leftwich said the pegmatite on display at the museum could have been in a cooling magma chamber or a similar environment. The large hunk of rock — visitors are encouraged to touch it — features large plates called albite or cleavelandite, which are types of feldspar, a group of minerals “distinguished by the presence of alumina and silica in their chemistry,” according to Minerals Education Coalition.
Celestian said the reason that hikers might observe a lot of quartz, feldspar and mica in the San Gabriel Mountains is because the range is “mostly like old basement volcano rocks.”
“It was like magma chambers that cooled down deep in the earth, and over time, that got pushed up to the surface, and that’s what we have in the San Gabriels and surrounding mountains,” he said.
A tourmaline on quartz on display at the “Unearthed: Raw Beauty” exhibit. The piece is from the tourmaline King Mine in San Diego County and is estimated to be 100 million years old.
(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
Are there any tools I can carry as a hiker to help me identify rocks?
Celestian has tested apps that claim to be able to identify rocks and has found they’re correct only about 10% to 15% of the time.
“A lizard is going to have the same morphology every single time. A bird is going to have the same morphology every single time. A mineral is not,” Celestian said.
Hence why it’s so hard to develop an app. Calcite, he said, can grow in hundreds of different forms, making it near impossible for an app to recognize it just by using a phone’s camera.
Still, the best tool for beginners is your phone’s camera because you can take photos of the rock in question for later research.
Taking pictures and “just trying to figure out your environment is really exciting,” Celestian said. “It matters a lot because all of the resources that we have available to us today came from the earth, and knowing more about how that came about, how much time it takes to create these things, adds a different perspective of Earth’s resources and how we appreciate them.”
A pegmatite rock on display at “Unearthed: Raw Beauty.” Attendees are allowed to touch and interact with the rock as part of the exhibit.
(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
To take the most useful images for mineral identification, I’d recommend reading the rock key from the Mineralogical Society of America before heading out. It will help you understand the types of pictures you need to take (especially since on our public lands, you’ll be leaving the rock where you found it).
For example, the first question on the rock key is, “Is the rock made of crystal grains? (Does it have a lot of flat, shiny faces — maybe tiny to small — that reflect light like little mirrors? You may need to use a magnifier.)” To answer that question, you’d want to ensure you captured those characteristics in your photographs.
A piece of gold stands on on display at “Unearthed: Raw Beauty.” The piece is from the Mother Lode District in El Dorado County.
(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
How can a hiker learn more about our local geology?
One of my biggest takeaways from my conversations with Celestian and Leftwich was our local geology varies widely, and thus, there’s a lot to learn. But that complexity opens up a great opportunity to find community.
You can join one of several local geology groups where hopefully you’ll find not only knowledge but also new friends. And for anyone wanting to dive a little deeper, there are local caving groups like the SoCal Grotto, which teaches its members how to explore safely and responsibly, along with hosting experts at its meetings where members learn about a range of earth science topics.
A final thought
“Look under the rock before you pick it up — because of spiders and snakes,” Celestian said.
3 things to do
(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)
1. Celebrate New Year’s Day hiking around L.A. California State Parks will host its annual First Day Hikes on Jan. 1 at more than 60 of its parks, including across L.A. At the Santa Susana Pass State Historic Park near Simi Valley, hikers can arrive by 11 a.m. for a stroll past its narrow canyons and hulking rocks. Mount San Jacinto State Park will host a snowshoeing hike at 11 a.m. for hikers willing to take the tram up. Or if you’re perhaps feeling like a later start, Malibu Creek State Park will host a guided night hike at 5 p.m., where hikers will trek under an almost full moon. Learn more, including how to register, at parks.ca.gov.
2. Nurture native plants in Agoura National Park Service and Santa Monica Mountains Fund need volunteers from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday to restore native plants around Cheeseboro Canyon. Participants will plant hundreds of live plants grown from locally collected seed. Register at eventbrite.com.
3. Capture the sunset in Borrego Springs The Anza-Borrego Foundation will host photographer Paulette Donnellon to teach a sunset photography class from 1:30 to 6:30 p.m. Jan. 3 at the park. Donnellon will share tips on how to shoot wildlife and landscapes before leading students into the desert for both golden hour and “blue hour” just after sunset. The class is $100. Register at theabf.org.
The must-read
Joseph Brambila vanished on Mt. Whitney in early November. This image is from a previous climb in the summer of 2025.
(Joseph Brambila)
Like many Southern California hikers, 21-year-old southeast L.A. County resident Joseph Brambila had fallen in love with Mt. Whitney. Only a four-hour drive north of L.A. to its trailhead, Mt. Whitney is the nation’s tallest mountain outside of Alaska. In early November, Brambila was reported missing, his last known location being Mt. Whitney. Times staff writer Jack Dolan spoke to Brambila’s family about the budding alpinist, highlighting what kept Brambila coming back to the mountain. “He always said he loves to disconnect from the real world,” his girlfriend, Darlene Molina, said. “He just wanted to be out there and enjoy life. … It was just him, nature, and God.” On Monday, the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office announced it had recovered the body of a young male hiker that fit the description of Brambila. He is the second person believed to have died near a steep, icy section of trail known as the 99 Switchbacks.
In reading Dolan’s story, I felt like I got a brief glimpse into the excitement and love that Brambila carried with him into the mountains. It’s an energy we can all relate to, one that keeps us returning for more.
Happy, safe adventuring,
P.S.
This is the final Wild for 2025. If you’d like to catch up on all we’ve covered, head over to our archives or my author page. The most-read Wild of the year was this piece about Austin Nicassio, founder of Accessible Off-Road, a nonprofit aimed at bringing off-road mobility devices to parks and trails around L.A. If you’re reading this as an email, consider replying and letting me know what you’d like to see more of. Yes, I read your last emails and I do plan to write more in 2026 about hikes in Orange and Ventura County. I love hearing from you and I cannot thank you enough for your support of The Wild. Happy holidays, friends!
For more insider tips on Southern California’s beaches, trails and parks, check out past editions of The Wild. And to view this newsletter in your browser, click here.
