12 Places in America That Don't Feel Real

Between two mountain ranges in southern New Mexico, roughly 275 square miles of desert basin are buried under dunes the colour of fresh snow. The park road climbs onto the dune field and the asphalt simply gives up — beyond a certain point you are driving on graded white sand, with pull-offs, picnic shelters and boardwalks scattered through it.

The scale takes a minute to register because there is nothing to give it away. No trees, no buildings, few shadows at midday. People sled down the slopes on waxed plastic discs, and from a hundred yards away they look like they are on a ski hill in July.

Okay… how did this happen?

The gypsum started out as an ancient sea. Hundreds of millions of years ago this region sat under shallow water that repeatedly evaporated, leaving thick beds of gypsum — calcium sulfate — locked in the rock.

Later, the crust here stretched and dropped, creating the Tularosa Basin between the San Andres and Sacramento mountains. Rain and snowmelt dissolve gypsum out of those mountains and carry it down into the basin. Crucially, the basin has no outlet to the sea, so the water has nowhere to go but into the flats and then into the air.

As it evaporates it leaves crystals of selenite behind on the lakebed. Wind grinds those crystals against each other into fine white grains and pushes them northeast into dunes. Because gypsum is soft and slightly soluble, the grains stay bright rather than weathering into ordinary quartz-coloured sand — and the whole system keeps refilling itself.

The Wave is a small sandstone bowl on the Arizona side of the Paria Canyon–Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, and it is genuinely small — the famous formation is a feature you can walk across in a couple of minutes. What makes it famous is the surface: fine bands of red, orange, cream and pink sweeping through the rock in continuous curves, as if the ground froze mid-motion.

Getting to it is a roughly three-mile cross-country walk each way with no trail, no signage and no water, navigating by landmarks and GPS over slickrock and sand.

Okay… how did this happen?

In the Jurassic, this whole region was an enormous sand sea — dunes on the scale of the Sahara. Wind piled sand into sloping layers, and each shift in wind direction left a new set of layers cutting across the old ones. That internal structure is called cross-bedding.

The dunes were buried, compressed and cemented into Navajo Sandstone. Groundwater carrying iron then moved through the rock, staining some layers deep red and leaving others pale, which is why the bands differ in colour rather than just in texture.

Much later, erosion cut down into that rock and exposed the ancient dune layering in cross-section. Runoff scoured out a shallow drainage, and wind kept polishing it. The 'flow' you see is simply the edges of buried dunes, sliced open and smoothed.

In the high desert north of Gerlach, three lumpy mineral towers a few feet tall spit water continuously into a series of terraced pools. They are coated in red, orange and green, and steam drifts off the whole thing against an empty valley floor.

It looks ancient and alien. It is neither — the geyser is younger than most people who go to see it, and it exists because of a well.

Okay… how did this happen?

The valley sits over a geothermal system: groundwater circulates deep, heats up and rises along faults. Drillers tapped that hot water. One well drilled in the 1960s was left uncapped, and pressurised geothermal water has been escaping ever since.

That water is loaded with dissolved minerals, mostly calcium carbonate and silica. When it hits the surface and cools and degasses, the minerals drop out of solution and cement onto whatever the water runs over. Decade after decade, the deposits build upward into cones — the same process that builds travertine terraces at natural hot springs, just started by a drill rig.

The colours are biology, not mineral pigment. Thermophilic algae and bacteria live in the warm runoff, and different species tolerate different temperatures, so the bands of red, orange and green track how hot the water is where they grow.

West of the Great Salt Lake, near the Nevada line, the ground turns into a hard white crust so flat that the mountains on the far side appear to float. In dry months you can walk — and in designated areas drive — out onto salt that stretches for miles with no features at all.

In wet months a shallow film of water sits on the surface and the whole plain becomes a mirror, which is when the reflection photographs everyone knows get made.

Okay… how did this happen?

During the last ice age, much of western Utah lay under Lake Bonneville, a freshwater lake on the scale of one of the Great Lakes. As the climate dried, the lake shrank drastically, and its old shorelines are still visible cut into the mountainsides.

That water contained dissolved salts. With no outlet, evaporation concentrated them, and as the lake retreated it left the minerals behind on the basin floor — mostly common salt, along with gypsum and other compounds.

The crust is still dynamic. Winter rain and runoff dissolve the surface and spread it into a thin brine layer; summer heat evaporates it and re-deposits salt in a flat, even sheet. That annual reset is what keeps the plain so extraordinarily level.

East of Yosemite, at the edge of the Great Basin, a pale blue lake sits in a volcanic basin ringed by knobbly limestone towers. The towers — tufa — rise straight out of the shallows and the shoreline, some of them taller than a person, clustered like a ruined city.

The water is roughly three times as salty as the ocean and strongly alkaline. Nothing with a backbone lives in it, yet in summer the surface swarms with brine flies and the air is full of birds.

Okay… how did this happen?

Mono Lake is very old and has no outlet. Streams from the Sierra Nevada carry dissolved minerals in; only water leaves, by evaporation. Over a very long time that has concentrated carbonates and salts until the lake became both salty and strongly alkaline.

The tufa formed underwater. Freshwater springs seep up through the lakebed carrying calcium; the lake water is loaded with carbonate. Where the two meet, calcium carbonate precipitates and slowly builds a tower around the spring vent, like limescale growing around a leak.

The towers are only visible because the lake shrank. When streams feeding the lake were diverted to supply Los Angeles, the level fell sharply and exposed structures that had been growing beneath the surface — which is why an ecological controversy is also the reason you can photograph them.

The ecosystem itself is short and strange: algae feed brine shrimp and alkali flies, and those feed enormous numbers of migratory birds. No fish, and no need for them.

In eastern Oregon's dry interior, a cluster of low, smooth hills is banded in ochre, gold, black and a distinct dusty red. There is no vegetation on them at all — the slopes are bare, finely ridged claystone, and the stripes run horizontally around the hills like contour lines.

Short trails and overlooks ring the unit, all of them keeping you off the hills themselves.

Okay… how did this happen?

This region spent tens of millions of years downwind of active volcanoes. Repeated ash falls buried the landscape again and again, and each ash layer weathered in place into clay.

What the clay turned into depended on the climate at the time. Warm, wet, heavily vegetated periods produced deep red soils rich in iron oxides. Drier, cooler periods produced the tans and yellows. Black layers are largely manganese and old plant material. Stacked up, those ancient soils became the stripes.

Erosion then stripped away the harder rock above and rounded the soft claystone into hills. The clay swells when wet and shrinks when dry, which cracks the surface into that fine popcorn texture and prevents plants from taking hold — leaving the colour completely exposed.

In southeastern Arizona, a mountain range rises out of the grassland and its slopes are covered in stone columns — thousands of them, standing upright in rows and clusters, some slender enough to look like they should have fallen over already.

A scenic drive climbs to Massai Point, and a network of trails drops down among the columns so you walk through corridors of rock rather than looking at them from above.

Okay… how did this happen?

Around 27 million years ago a nearby volcanic centre produced a colossal eruption — vastly larger than anything in recorded history. It buried this area in searing volcanic ash hundreds of feet deep.

The ash was hot enough to weld itself together as it settled, forming a hard rock called rhyolite tuff. As that thick sheet cooled it contracted and cracked, developing a grid of vertical joints running through it.

Everything since has been water and ice exploiting those cracks. Rain gets in, freezes, expands and widens the joints; over millions of years the rock between them is worn away and what remains stands as columns. Where a harder cap rock protected the top of a column, you get the balanced-boulder look.

From the desert surface, Antelope Canyon is a crack in the ground. Inside, it opens into narrow sandstone corridors with walls that curve and fold overhead, sometimes only a few feet apart, sometimes over a hundred feet deep.

The canyon lies within the Navajo Nation and is visited only with Navajo guides. Upper and Lower Antelope are separate sections with different tour operators and a different feel underground.

Okay… how did this happen?

The rock is Navajo Sandstone: ancient wind-blown dunes, cemented into stone, relatively soft and full of internal layering.

The canyon is carved by flash floods. Rain that falls miles away runs off slickrock instead of soaking in, funnels into a single drainage and arrives here as a fast, sand-loaded surge. That sand is the cutting tool — the water sandblasts the channel deeper and wider each time.

Because the flow swirls as it moves, the erosion is not a straight slot but a series of scallops and flutes, deeper where the current pressed hardest. The visible layering is the old dune bedding being sliced at different angles as the channel wanders.

The famous colour is indirect light. Sun entering the narrow opening reflects off one wall onto another, and each bounce shifts the tone warmer — which is why the canyon glows without any direct sunbeam reaching you.

Driving west across South Dakota, the prairie is flat and green and then, without much warning, the ground falls away into a maze of striped spires, ridges and gullies running to the horizon.

A loop road follows the rim with overlooks every few miles, and short trails — including a ladder climb at Notch Trail — drop into the formations themselves.

Okay… how did this happen?

The layers were laid down over tens of millions of years in very different worlds: a shallow inland sea, then floodplains and forests, then volcanic ash blowing in from eruptions far to the west. Each environment left sediment of a different colour and hardness — which is why the stripes line up across ridges that are now separated by empty air.

Then the region was uplifted, and rivers began cutting down through the soft sediments. The rock here is poorly cemented mudstone and siltstone, so water carves it fast rather than smoothing it.

The erosion rate is the headline. These formations are wearing away at roughly an inch a year — geologically breakneck. The park is temporary in a way most landscapes are not, and the same rapid erosion keeps exposing new fossils.

In far northern California, a park most people drive past contains boiling mud pots, roaring steam vents, milky turquoise pools and a mountain that erupted in the twentieth century.

A boardwalk at Bumpass Hell crosses a basin of hydrothermal features; elsewhere the park is alpine lakes, conifer forest and a highway that climbs above 8,000 feet.

Okay… how did this happen?

Lassen sits at the southern end of the Cascade Range, where an oceanic plate is sliding beneath North America. Water driven off that descending slab makes the rock above melt, and that magma rises to build volcanoes.

A body of hot rock still sits beneath the park. Snowmelt and rain percolate down, get heated, and rise back up as steam and hot water. Where that water reaches the surface it cooks the rock into clay — which is why the mud pots exist and why the ground is pale and crumbly.

The colours come from chemistry and microbes: sulfur compounds, iron minerals and heat-loving organisms that tint the pools and crusts. The smell of rotten eggs is hydrogen sulfide coming off the same system.

Lassen Peak itself is a plug dome — thick, sticky lava that piled up rather than flowing away. It erupted in a series of events beginning in 1914, with a major blast in 1915 that devastated an area still visible as the Devastated Area today.

From the surface this is unremarkable Chihuahuan Desert scrub. Then you walk down through a gaping natural entrance, switchback after switchback, and after a mile of descent the passage opens into a chamber so large that the lighting cannot reach the far end.

The Big Room is the centrepiece — a level paved loop through a space of many acres, filled with stalagmites, columns and formations the size of buildings.

Okay… how did this happen?

The bedrock is an ancient reef. Roughly 250 million years ago a shallow sea covered this area, and a long reef of limestone built up along its edge. The sea dried out, the reef was buried, and later uplift raised it into the mountains you see today.

The cave was then dissolved out of that limestone — but not, as in most caves, mainly by rainwater. Oil and gas deposits deep below released hydrogen sulfide, which mixed with oxygen-rich groundwater to form sulfuric acid. That acid ate out the chambers from below, which is why the rooms here are so enormous.

Evidence of the process is still on the walls: thick gypsum deposits left behind as a by-product of the acid reacting with limestone.

The decoration came later. Once the chambers drained, water seeping down through the rock carried dissolved calcium carbonate, and each drop left a trace behind — building stalactites, stalagmites, columns and draperies over hundreds of thousands of years.

In the rolling pine country of northeastern Wyoming, a flat-topped tower of grey rock rises abruptly out of the trees, its sides covered in enormous vertical columns running from base to summit.

A paved loop trail circles the base in a bit over a mile, close enough that fallen columns the size of railcars lie in the boulder field beside the path.

Okay… how did this happen?

Around 50 million years ago, molten rock pushed up into sedimentary layers here and stalled underground rather than erupting. Geologists still debate exactly what form that intrusion took — a plug, a laccolith, or the neck of a volcanic system.

As the trapped magma cooled it contracted, and contracting rock cracks in a predictable way: into a network of roughly hexagonal columns perpendicular to the cooling surface. That is the same process behind the Giant's Causeway, just at far greater height.

The tower only became a tower because everything around it eroded away. The intrusion is much harder than the surrounding sedimentary rock, so as rivers stripped the softer layers off over tens of millions of years, the resistant core was left standing. Columns still break away occasionally, adding to the boulder field.