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There is a lake in British Columbia’s Similkameen Valley that, for most of the year, looks like any other body of water. Then summer arrives, temperatures climb into the high desert heat, and the water starts to evaporate. What it leaves behind is one of the strangest surfaces in North America: hundreds of shallow circular…

Toronto has a secret: it’s one of the most wonderfully weird major cities in North America, and almost nobody knows it. On the surface, Toronto seems more mainstream. It’s clean. It’s multicultural. It’s got excellent food and professional sports teams and financial institutions. It’s the kind of city that gets praised for being “world-class” and…

Late at night, somewhere in a marsh or bog, a flickering light appears. It is the right height to be a lantern. It moves in a way that suggests purpose. You follow it. The path you were on disappears behind you. The light keeps moving. Eventually you realize the ground beneath your feet is not…

Most people think they know the Jamestown story. It’s a story that has grown, evolved, and been told through the generations as a piece of America’s first history. Pocahontas saves Captain John Smith. English colonists struggle and survive. End of story. But the real story is messier, more human, and infinitely more interesting than Hollywood…

The Yucatan Peninsula has no surface rivers. No lakes to speak of either. A vast limestone shelf sits just below the ground. Over millions of years, rainwater has dissolved passages through it. This process has created one of the largest underground river systems on Earth. In places, the ceiling of these underground passages collapses, and…

Most people who visit Paris know there are catacombs. You queue at the entrance on the Place Denfert-Rochereau, descend about 65 feet underground, walk through roughly a mile of tunnels neatly lined with the bones of six million Parisians, and come back up feeling appropriately unsettled. It is a genuinely memorable experience. It is also,…

Let me start with the thing that I think is most important to know before explaining anything else: the famous circular stone covered in concentric rings that everyone calls the Aztec Calendar is probably not a calendar. Archaeologists think it is more likely a sacrificial altar, a solar monument legitimizing royal power, or some combination…

There is a region of northern Peru called the Amazonas, high in the Andes where the mountains meet the Amazon basin and the cloud forest hangs over everything. Somewhere around 800 CE, a civilization we now call the Chachapoya built a society there that lasted for roughly 700 years. They built a walled city larger…

Ikaria is a small Greek island in the eastern Aegean Sea, about 19 miles southwest of Samos. Roughly 8,000 people live there. The terrain is mountainous, the roads are winding and occasionally alarming, and the island is home to one of the highest concentrations of people over 100 years old anywhere on Earth. Researchers started…

When you fly into Pisa and drive north up the Tuscan coast toward the Ligurian border, you start noticing white peaks in the mountains above the highway. It is not snow. It’s marble. The entire upper range of the Apuan Alps above the town of Carrara is marble. Remarkably, it has been coming down those…

Above a window on the second tier of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City, a small wooden ladder leans against the stone facade. The ladder has five or six rungs, cut from Lebanon cedar. It has been photographed, sketched, and painted continuously since at least 1728. In fact, it is visible…

There is a forest on the border between Poland and Belarus that has been there for 12,000 years. It predates both countries and the entire concept of the nation-state. It is the last remaining fragment of the vast primeval lowland forest that once covered most of Europe. Ancient trees up to 600 years old stand…

AlUla is one of those places where the more you read, the more surreal it gets. In the desert of northwestern Saudi Arabia, in a narrow valley carved by an ancient river, there is a region with 30,000 documented archaeological sites, over 110 monumental rock-cut tombs built by the same civilization that made Petra, a…

In 1960, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake in the world. It covered about 26,300 square miles. It had a thriving fishing industry, a fleet, canneries, beach towns. The rivers flowing into it had been doing so for thousands of years. By 2007, roughly 90 percent of it was gone. Not from a…

Near the summit of a 7,000-foot mountain in southeastern Turkey, a collection of giant stone heads sits on the ground staring at the horizon. These heads once belonged to statues 26 to 33 feet tall. Earthquakes knocked them off over the centuries. Nobody has put them back. They have been lying there like that for…

There are places that photographs cannot prepare you for, and the hanging coffins of Sagada are one of them. Not because the images are inadequate, but because knowing what you are looking at changes the experience of looking at it. You are not seeing a landmark. You are seeing a community’s relationship with death, preserved…

Every city with a castle has a founding legend. Most of them involve a king or a warrior or a divine sign. Kraków’s involves a cobbler’s apprentice, a lamb stuffed with sulfur, and a dragon that drank itself to death from the Vistula River. I have a soft spot for founding legends where the hero…

Okay so via ferrata is a thing I keep trying to explain to people and failing. This is because the explanation sounds either terrifying or boring depending on the person, and it is actually neither. Via ferrata translates from Italian as “iron road.” It describes a climbing route where fixed steel cables, iron rungs, ladders,…

There is a village in Andalusia, southern Spain, where people have been living inside a river gorge for at least 5,000 years, and the houses use the cliff face as their back wall and the overhang of the rock as their roof. You walk down the main street and instead of sky above you, there…

I have been deep in Egypt research lately and I need to share what I found because the amount of people in my life who have Egypt on their list and have not booked it yet is genuinely frustrating to me at this point. It is not a complicated trip. It is not as expensive…

The story most people know goes like this: the Library of Alexandria was the greatest repository of knowledge in the ancient world, and then religious fanatics burned it to the ground and plunged humanity into centuries of darkness. This version is satisfying. It has drama, a clear villain, and a tidy lesson about the dangers…

I saw Avatar when it came out in 2009 and thought it was fine. Not a movie I think about much. But the landscape it borrowed from is something I have been thinking about almost constantly. This started since I learned what it actually is and where it actually comes from. Zhangjiajie is a national…

The first time I saw photographs of Shilin, I assumed someone had applied a filter or done something clever in post. Sharp limestone pillars rising 50 to 100 feet from flat ground, densely packed like the world’s most dramatic hedge maze, covered in greenery clinging to vertical rock faces. The kind of landscape that looks…

You have seen the photographs. The ones where the ground looks like sky. Someone stands in the middle of an infinite reflection and you cannot tell which way is up. You probably assumed they were heavily edited, or taken in some impossible five-minute window you would never manage to replicate. Here is the thing: they…

There is a man whose entire job, every single day, is to make sure six ravens do not leave the Tower of London. He wakes up at first light and lets them out of their enclosures. Next, he cleans up after them and feeds them raw meat and blood-soaked biscuits. Throughout the day, he spends…