Places From the Backwoods Wants to Go

Legend has this precariously placed rock was placed by giants. Science has another explanation.

An alien church provides much needed silence in the midst of a Finland shopping center.

A subterranean house of worship carved right out of the bedrock.

Architecturally stunning library serves as the hub of Finnish scholarly life and culture.

This fantastical icy castle is built anew every winter.

The deepest hole drilled in the name of science, where evidence of Precambrian life was found.

A lumberjack in Finnish Lapland did not want to cut down his Arctic pines, so he offered them up to be adopted by nature-lovers.

This disused church, left to the elements of the Arctic Circle's forests is open for exploration.

Rent out a glass igloo to watch the Northern Lights like you live in the future.

A beautiful Arctic museum and nature center preserves the culture of the Sámi people.

Thousands of letters to Santa get delivered to this mailbox in Greenland.

No longer the only, but definitely the oldest, fountain in Greenland.

1% of Greenland's entire population used to live in this single building, which is now slated for demolition.

An experimental forest at the foreground of arboreal science is also the canary in the coal mine for climate change.

One Greenland town turned itself into an open air sculpture gallery with the help of a series of traditional stone artworks.

The 3.8 billion-year-old rock proves that tectonic plates may have been shifting longer than we thought.

Neither bomb blasts nor heartbeats escape the giant ears of this super sci-fi Arctic outpost.

Where scientists keep miles of very valuable ice from Antarctica and Greenland from melting.

Trek up this glacier before it disappears.

This stunning mass of ice spans 121 square miles and is still growing.

Small Island off the coast of Greenland.

A Cold War atomic camp buried under the ice is now emerging because of global warming.

This remote research station sits amid the second-largest ice sheet on the planet.

The world's northernmost flowers cling tenuously to life on desolate Kaffeklubben Island.