Places Sputnicktatorship Wants to Go

A toxic ghost town sitting atop a massive coal fire.

Rising from the sea like a stone monster.

A vertically floating hemlock controls the waves and weather at Crater Lake.

The deepest lake in the United States, and once the site of epic destruction that lives on in legends.

The most iconic structure in Scotland has been home to bishops, colonels, and Sean Connery characters.

This volcanic cave lake is essentially hard proof that Iceland is the most magical place on Earth.

Explore the largest pure gypsum deposit in the world, and go dune sledding while you're at it.

Seemingly grown on some other world, these New Mexico rock formations look like a disused science fiction set.

A self-built castle made by a mysterious man.

Clean, cold drinking water flows from a nondescript pipe in a roadside rock face.

The sculpture's largest spire points directly toward the North Star.

Alaska Natives have lived on this tiny isolated island in the Bering Strait for over 5,000 years.

At 238 feet above the bottom of a gorge this span is known as the biggest thrill on the road to McCarthy.

Research missiles and rainbow auroras at the world's largest land-based rocket range.

During the summer, surfers in Alaska take advantage of this inlet’s unusual water patterns.

A high school astronomy enthusiast designed this model of our solar system to be traversed on foot.

An auroral research program that superheats the ionosphere.

A historic freight system that found the true gold rush is in tourism.

Massive mounds of golden sand look like a desert landscape randomly plopped in an Arctic forest.

This frozen tunnel in central Alaska is both an engineering feat and a valuable climate classroom.

Upside-down trees serve as natural flower pots in this hanging garden of Alaska.

The ghostly remains of what was once the world's richest copper mine.

A island reachable by a causeway at low tide is possibly one of the earliest Western European locations to be identified in text.

An isolated 17th-century chapel on a remarkable site once dedicated to Celtic sun worship.