Outside the village of Nowe Czarnowo, near Gryfino in northwestern Poland, a grove of pines all bend the same way. Around 400 were counted in the past, and about 100 survive today. Each trunk rises a short way out of the ground, hooks sharply sideways to the north, travels three…
Marzamemi has fewer than 400 full-time residents, no train station, and a harbor small enough to walk around in ten minutes. It has also appeared on camera more often than towns a hundred times its size — a run of Italian films, a long-running television series and at least one…
Backcountry camping is closed Backcountry camping at White Sands National Park is closed while park staff assess environmental conditions, and the National Park Service says overnight stays are not currently permitted anywhere in the park, with no reopening date set (the page was last updated on 12 August 2026). When…
New Zealand’s South Island has huge amounts of scenery and long, quiet roads between towns, and that is part of the problem. The roads that make the postcard shots possible — one-lane bridges over braided rivers, alpine passes that close overnight, gravel spurs to trailheads — are also the roads…
Hallstatt is a village of roughly 750 people wrapped around a lake in Austria’s Salzkammergut, and on a peak summer day it can receive more visitors than it has residents by a factor of ten or more. Locals have blocked their own access road in protest, the municipality put up…
The Wave doesn’t look fragile. Photographs of its swirling red-and-cream sandstone make it look like solid rock that’s been there for millions of years and will be there for millions more, no matter how many boots cross it. That’s exactly why the numbers surprise people: the Bureau of Land Management…
The Azores reward a rental car more than almost anywhere else in Europe — the islands were built for driving, with volcanic crater lakes and hot springs scattered across winding roads that no bus route was ever designed to serve. But a car-free weekend on São Miguel, the archipelago’s largest…
Abergynolwyn is not a place most people have heard of, and it isn’t trying to be. It’s a village of a few hundred people tucked into a green valley in Gwynedd, and it has no visitor center, no gift shop, and no queue. What it does have is a direct,…
Most Denver-area hiking guides funnel visitors toward the same handful of trailheads — and a few of those trailheads now require a permit just to show up. This guide covers four hikes within about two hours of Denver that don’t: a hiker-only foothills loop with skyline views of Golden, a…
Most of New Mexico’s famous rock country comes with a parking lot, a paved overlook, and a permit lottery. The Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness has none of that. There’s no marked trail, no ranger station, no cell signal, and no fee — just 45,000 acres of eroded badlands south of Farmington where…