Zona Arqueológica de Teuchitlán

The Zona Arqueológica de Teuchitlán, also known as Guachimontones, is a captivating ancient site in the scenic landscape of Jalisco, Mexico. What sets this archaeological treasure apart are its circular stepped pyramids, or "guachimontones," which stand as a unique testament to the rich history of the region.

Dating back to the era between 300 BCE and 900 CE, the Teuchitlán culture left behind these enigmatic structures, which are a marvel of ancient engineering and architectural prowess. The circular stepped pyramids are a striking departure from the more familiar Mesoamerican pyramid shapes, featuring concentric circles of terraces culminating in a central altar. These structures likely served as ceremonial platforms for religious rites and communal gatherings, offering a glimpse into the spiritual practices and social dynamics of the Teuchitlán people. 

Read More: The New York Cave of the Winds

Santa Rosa Blue Hole, New Mexico

The Santa Rosa Blue Hole of New Mexico is circular bell-shaped pool for scuba diving and training. It is one of most popular diving destinations, is an artesian once used as a fish hatchery.

The crystal-clear water with constant 62 °F (17 °C) temperature and constant inflow of 3,000 US gallons per minute (11 m3/min; 2,500 imp gal/min). However, Santa Rosa surface is only 24 meters (80ft) in diameter and 40 meters at the bottom.  Due to its high elevation, (1,407 meters), divers must use high altitude dive tablets to compute the dive profile and decompression stops.

These are the above Blue Holes in the world, where you would feel to swim into the earth forever. These geological phenomenon sinkhole fills with crystal clear water and becomes vertical void in the landscape. The fantastic marine life such as parrot fish, Schools of Bream, Moray Eel, Lobster, Octopus and much more for all level of divers as there are several depths and routes to choose from.

Nambe Falls – New Mexico

In the Southwest Desert, you would expect arid area.  But there is unexpected waterfall surprise you on the northwestern part of New Mexico. That is called Name Falls or Nambé Falls located on the back of Sangre de Cristo mountains about 30 miles north of Santa Fe. The height of two tiers waterfall is 100ft and 75ft respectively.

Nambe Falls has massive potential to be one of biggest tourist attraction in this area. The falls alluring views looking downstream make it a special picnic place. Further, an imposing 150ft dam and spillway directly above the waterfall. Though, dam erode the scenic allure of waterfalls, but it serves the main purpose of providing water to Nambe People.

Nambe Falls also provide a chance to offset the desert heat in the seemingly reliably flowing rushing creek. Nambe Falls overlook down at the steepness and rough the scramble would be to get up to the bases of the upper two drops, a dangerous and not-so-easy scramble. 

This sedate place provides an opportunity to experience the true nature, enjoy the waterfalls, feel the breeze. Nambé Falls is a real pleasure that can be repeated once in your life. This spot is for all families with children, outdoor-recreation programs and large groups.

Trail to Nambe Falls

If you are hiker and love hiking, then it is highly recommended to take either option available here. First you must be directed to the dry or wet trail. Not more than mile trail will take you a gentle incline to an aerial view of two-tiered waterfall.  This fall is nestled into the Nambé Pueblo, hence you want to take more risk for challenging and refreshing hike.

Then brave to opt the quarter mile wet trail. But be sure to wear the proper water proof shoes, as the water is extremely cold. This is scenic trail will take you winding and crossing the river upstream for half of it. A worthful hike make your toe frozen, but reward is awesome.

You can sit around the falls, relaxing your mind and body with the sheer sound of waterfalls. By closing to nature, it is popular quote that “Nature heals your Mind and Body”. You may also feel the cold breeze and take selfies and photographs. You have enough time in the summer but be aware of limited hours in other seasons. Also, more water flow observes in early spring and summer season.

So, this trail is mainly used for walking, hiking, and nature trips. Some scatter vegetation obstructing the view of lower drop of Nambe Falls. Don’t take any risk for precarious scrambling exposure of deep drop off present. In the end, since you’re already wet, why not take a heart-pounding dip into each of the pools below each tier falls? Source: - CP

Lechuguilla Cave – Jewel of Branched Underground Cave

Lechuguilla Cave is 8^th longest explored cave in the world. The 222.6 km, is the second deepest cave 1,604 ft in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico. Lechuguilla Cave is famous for its strange geology, rare formation, and pristine condition. The cave is named for the canyon Agave lechuguilla, a rare species found here. Before 1986, this cave was known as a small insignificant historic site.

Access to Lechuguilla Cave is not for everyone. Only researchers, scientific, exploration team and National Park service management allow entering it. Bat guano was mined under a mining claim field. This historical cave has big 90-foot entrance named Misery Hole, mainly led to 400 feet of dry, dead-end passages. The cave was visited intermittently after mining activities stopped. In the 1950s, cavers heard the mysterious wind roaring up from the rubble-choked cave floor. However, no route was obvious; people concluded that cave passages lay below the rubble.

A large walking passage occurred in 1986, after the digging of a group of cavers. The explorers mapped a 222 km of passages, making it 4th longest in the United States. The cave's pristine condition and rare beauty covers come from around the world to explore and map its passages and geology. An explorer team climbed over 410 feet into a dome and unearthed many new unexplored passages, pits, and large rooms.

Lechuguilla Cave holds a variety of rare speleothems, lemon yellow sulfur deposits, gypsum chandeliers, gypsum hairs and beards, soda straws, cave pearls, hydromagnesite ballons, rusticles, helictites, U-loops and J-Loops. The cave surpasses nearby Carlsbad Caverns in size, depth, and variety of speleothems, though no room has been discovered yet in Lechuguilla Cave that is larger than Carlsbad's Big Room. The abundance of gypsum and sulfur lends sustenance to speleogenesis by sulfuric acid dissolution. The sulfuric acid is thought to be derived from hydrogen sulfide that migrated from nearby oil deposits. As a result, this cavern formed from the bottom up, in contrast to the normal top-down carbonic acid dissolution mechanism of cave formation.

A beautiful wilderness area lies beneath a park adjacent Bureau of Land Management Land. The oil drilling and proposed gas is a major threat to this cave. In case of any leaked in gas could kill cave life or disastrous explosions. Further, a rare type of chemolithoautotrophic bacteria is believed to take place in the cave. These bacteria normally feed on the sulfur, iron, and manganese minerals. Few microbes may have medicinal qualities that are beneficial to humans. Moreover, a four-million-year-old strain of Paenibacillus isolated from soil samples was found to be naturally resistant to numerous modern antibiotics, including daptomycin.

A BBC documentary featuring Lechuguilla Cave in his Planet Earth series, exploring Chandeliers Ballroom, high-quality crystals. In 1992 A National Geographic Society program Mysteries Underground was also filmed extensively in Lechuguilla Cave. So this jewel of underground Cave is the ultimate destination for any caver. Source - CP

Island of Dolls, Mexico

Every year hundreds of photographers and thrill seekers travel to haunt Isla De Las Mulecas (island of the Dolls). That doesn’t mean it’s a tourist destination. After a two-hour canal ride from Mexico City, a nightmarish clearing deep in the woods where thousands of mutilated dolls hang from the trees and hide among the dense branches. A reclusive Mexican man who believed dedicated to the soul of young girl, appease the troubled ghost who passed away at a tender age there over 50 years ago, still haunts the woods today. It is also known locally as the 'chinampas' where, grew vegetables and flowers to sell in the nearest town but never spoke to anyone while he was there.

The island of dolls is a creepiest destination in Xochimilco, Mexico. It was a floating garden, now home to hundreds of terrifying, mutilated dolls. Their severed limbs, decapitated heads, and blank eyes hung on trees, fences and nearly every available surface. The dolls appear menacing even in the bright light of midday, but in the dark they are particularly haunting. The tragic story behind this haunted island lies occurred in 1950. Don Julian Santana Barrera was the only dweller and caretaker of the island. He found a little girl drowned, in a canal surrounding the island strangely. He wasn’t able to save her life. Hence, shortly thereafter, Julian saw a floating doll near the canal, assuming it to be the girl’s doll.

He later discovered a doll floating in the same waters and, assuming it belonged to the deceased girl, hung it from a tree as a sign of respect. His descent into madness began with this seemingly innocent act. He was feeling so guilty of not saving the girl’s life. She has made Julian restless. He felt that the island was haunted by the girl’s spirit. Only one doll, he felt was not enough to please the child, he felt the girl needed company. Barrera began to hear whispers, footsteps and the anguished wails of a woman in the darkness even though his hut - hidden deep inside the woods of Xochimilco - was miles away from civilization. Terrified by the spirit, he started collecting dolls. He would find in the canal, from heaps of trash and hundreds of toys. Then some missing body parts from the trees and the wire fencing which surrounded his wooden shack.

Over half a century, he collected more than 1,500 of these little horrors. All the dolls are still there untouched. They look like decaying corpses of children. Later Santana died of a heart attack in 2001, and a small white cross near the water marks his grave. Some stories say that he was found drowned in the canal in the same manner as the dead girl. Julian Santana Barrera retreated to the woods soon after she drowned in the nearby canal. Driven by fear, he hung the dismembered toys from the trees to protect himself from her ghost and spent the next 50 years 'decorating' the woods in a desperate attempt to appease her.

He was also claimed that he could hear her tormented screams and footsteps in the darkness. However, the truth behind the story is still a mystery. Some even doubt the existence of the drowned girl. Some say Julian had made up this story in his loneliness. Some say that Julian had gone mad and felt that the dolls were the tortured spirits of children who passed early. People close to Julian say that it felt as if he was driven by a certain force, which had changed him completely. Even today after the 14 years of his own mysterious death in those woods. The visitors say they hear whispers in the night and feel the dolls' eyes following them through the trees.

The area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, which expanded tourism to the area. But there excitement turns to horror when they stumble upon the Island of the Dolls. The truth, as told by his family members who now run the island as a tourist attraction. Barrera simply believed the island was haunted by the spirit of the dead girl he found in the canal. After his death, the area became a popular tourist attraction where visitors bring more dolls. The locals describe it as 'charmed' not haunted and even though travelers claim the dolls whisper to them. For decades, many dolls were exposed to the elements and are certainly weathered and decayed with only doll-heads hanging from rusty wires in the tree. Visitors leave coins and trinkets at several of the doll shrines found inside some of the Island’s loosely-constructed buildings. Source: CP

 

 

Mount Mayon, Mexico

Mount Mayon, also known as the Mayon Volcano, is an active stratovolcano with a small central summit crater on the island of Luzon in the island of Luzon in Philippines. The Philippines, which has a population of 103,775,002, became an independent state in 1946, after gaining its sovereignty from Spain. The Mount Mayon is renowned for its almost symmetric conical shape. Mayon is considered to have the world's most perfectly formed cone due to its symmetry. It was formed through layers of pyroclastic and lava flows from past eruptions and erosion. Mayon is a part of the Pacific Ring of Fire.

Mayon, in north-eastern Albay province, is the most active volcano in the Philippines having erupted about 50 times in the last 500 years. The distinctiveness of Mayon volcano is geographically shared by the eight cities and municipalities which meet at the cone’s summit, dividing the cone like slices of a pie when viewed from above. There are many festivals and rituals are associated with the volcano and its landscape. The most destructive eruption of Mayon occurred on in Feb 1, 1814.  Lava was flowed belched dark ash 30ft in depth and eventually bombarded the town of Cagsawa 1200 locals perished with tephra that buried it.

Trees burned, and rivers damaged and proximate areas were devastated by the eruption. Moreover, another massive eruption recorded in 1881. Everyone had to leave their homes, rice, vegetables and poultry farms within the danger zone. When Mayon underwent a strong volcano had poured out, for five months continuously, a stream of lava on the Legaspi side from the very summit. The viscid mass bubbled quietly but grandly, and overran the border of the crater, descending several hundred feet in a glowing wave, like red-hot iron. An eruption in 1993 caused 79 deaths. And subsequent eruptions in 2000, 2006, 2009, 2014, and 2018 forced tens of thousands of people in nearby villages to evacuate.

The Mayon Volcano is located on the convergent boundary where the Philippine Sea Plate is driven under the Philippine Mobile Belt. The lighter continental plate floats over top of the oceanic plate. It is forcing it down into the Earth's mantle, and allowing magma to well up from the Earth’s interior. The magma exits through weaknesses in the continental crust, one of which is Mount Mayon. The locals refers the volcano being named after the great princess-heroine Daragang Magayon

The active volcano has managed to retain its perfect cone shape without suffering any major slides or collapse. The volcano is the centerpiece of the Albay Biosphere Reserve, declared by UNESCO in 2016. The main landmark is rising 2462 meters above the Albay Gulf.  It has very steep upper slopes averaging 35 to 40 degrees capped by a small summit crater. Due to its perfect symmetric cone, the mountain was declared a national park and a protected landscape on July 20, 1938.

It was also reclassified a Natural Park and renamed as the Mayon Volcano Natural Park in 2000. Mount Mayon is the most active volcano in the Philippines. Hence its activity is regularly monitored by PHIVOLCS from their provincial headquarters on Ligñon Hill, about 12KM SSE from the summit. Three telemetric units are installed on Mayon's slopes, which relay information to the seven seismometers in different locations around the volcano and back to the Ligñon Hill observatory and the PHIVOLCS central headquarters. Despite of all facts, Mount Mayon is a popular destination for climbers and tourists.
Source: CP

 

Santa Rosa Blue Hole, New Mexico

On the east of Santa Rosa, there’s bell-shaped pool called Blue Hole located off Route 66 in New Mexico. Like several other natural pools of its similar types, the Santa Rosa Blue Hole is a small body of water that seems to fill a surprisingly deep hole in the ground with shockingly clear waters. The circular blue hole is one of most popular dive destination in the US for SCUBA diving and training session. The arid climes is a natural swimming hole that has a hidden system of underwater caves which were unexplored until 2013. The famous Blue Hole is an artesian well that was once used as a fish hatchery. The blue hole has clear water with a persistent 62 °F temperature and persistent inflow of 3,000 US gallons per minute.

Though the surface is only 80 feet in diameter, it expands to a diameter of 130 feet at the bottom. The site elevation is 4,616 ft, it is necessary for divers to use high-altitude dive tables to compute the dive profile and decompression stops when diving in the Blue Hole. The Santa Rosa deep hole was an ideal spot for scuba divers until two young divers became trapped in the pool’s tight underwater caves. After their deaths in 1976, the entrance to the caves was covered with a metal grate and all but forgotten.

In 2013, a group of adventurous divers were allowed to past the grate with the intention of mapping the system of unexplored caves. Therefore, their early probing was stymied by decades of debris and too tight passages but the excavation continues with a watchful eye towards safety lest further deaths close off the secretive caverns for decades to come. It’s still unclear how far back the caves go. The pool is open for public use with no lifeguards on duty, however another sad incident took place on March 26, 2016 when 43 year old California diver was exploring passageways where he became trapped and drowned.

In fact Santa Rosa Blue hole is a wonderful stop, where divers can jump off the rock or enter via the stairs across from the jumping rock. Santa Rosa is known as the "City of Natural Lakes," is overflowing with pristine bodies of water that provide an invigorating blue splash in an otherwise arid landscape. The Blue Hole, fed from an underwater aquifer, about 8,000 diving permits are issued per year from around the world. A super place particularly in a hot day, as water is cold and refreshing and if you get there earlier in the day before it gets churned up it is crystal clear. It is like a slice of the Caribbean in the middle of New Mexico.