When Off the Beaten Track debuted in early 2021, the Capital Region was tenuously crawling back from the worst pandemic in more than a hundred years. As we poked our heads outside, we wondered which businesses made it out OK, and how did they do it? Their compelling tales were the overriding storylines of those early post-pandemic days, while impacts from COVID-19 stretched throughout OTBT’s run.

CalMatters: Glenn Medical Center, a 25-bed hospital in the rural agricultural town of Willows, north of Sacramento, is about to lose its “critical access” title. Without it, administrators say the hospital couldn’t afford to stay open because it would lose its increased Medicare reimbursements and regulatory flexibilities.

Behind a nearly obscured sign on Highway 99 is a 95-year-old bastion of Italian American food and heritage that still offers Spaghetti Monday every week. 

Today, Osaka-Ya is the only dedicated Japanese mochi and manju shop in Sacramento, but you can find other Japanese and Japanese-inspired sweets around the city. 

The job search is tedious on both ends. Depending on the size of the company, employers might sift through thousands of resumes to narrow down the field and find a single hire. It was a matter of time before technology came to the rescue.

Pokémon has earned an estimated $147 billion in revenue, making it the highest-grossing media franchise of all time. There’s money to be made in Pokémon cards even on the local level across the Capital Region, but profits aren’t guaranteed.

Not quite two years old, the Amador line of Rail Explorers in Ione is a unique, self-motorized way to experience the countryside of Amador County’s historic Mother Lode region.

Certainly, many employers are recognizing the business benefits of people working together in an office at least a few days per week, but widespread employee protests have shown that implementing that return is going to be an uphill battle. So what do you do as an employer who’s ready to make that call? And what rights do you have if your boss wants you back in a cubicle?

A festive grand opening celebration and ribbon cutting was held May 2 for Aggie Square, the $1.1 billion innovation center for UC Davis that has been eight years in the making.

Autism is neither a disease nor a sickness. But for the increasing population of those diagnosed — one in 31 children is the current count in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — it’s quite real. What might surprise you is that when it comes to learning about and managing autism, the Capital Region is very much in the forefront.