Zhangjiajie National Forest Park
When James Cameron sought inspiration for Pandora's floating mountains in "Avatar," he found it here—in China's Zhangjiajie. Thousands of quartzite pillars covered with pines rise from the mist like ghosts. This place is so unreal it seems like computer graphics. But this is Earth—and you can see it with your own eyes.
Geology of the Floating Mountains
Zhangjiajie's pillars are the result of hundreds of millions of years of erosion. Once this was sea, then mountains. Water and wind carved more than 3,000 pillars from quartzite sandstone, some reaching 200 meters in height. The subtropical cl...
