### Rainbow Mountain (Vinicunca)
Peru — Hidden under ice until a few years ago, this 17,060-foot mountain is naturally striped in fourteen pastel colors.
For centuries, Rainbow Mountain was a secret kept by the ice. It was virtually unknown to the outside world until around 2013 to 2015. Rising temperatures melted the glaciers that capped the mountain, revealing a landscape that looks like it was painted by a giant brush. But those pastel ribbons of pink, red, lavender, turquoise, and yellow aren't a recent creation—they are a 24-million-year-old masterpiece.
Long before this was a towering mountain, these colorful layers were just ordinary sand, clay, and mud resting at the bottom of an ancient ocean. Over millions of years, the slow, unstoppable collision of tectonic plates crumpled the Earth's crust, pushing that ocean floor thousands of feet into the sky to form the Andes Mountains.
Once the ice finally melted away, these stacked, mineral-rich layers were exposed to the air and began a process called mineral oxidation—essentially, the mountain is rusting. Red clay turns pink, quartz sandstone looks white, marl creates lavender, copper oxide flashes turquoise, and limonites rust into yellow-browns. Don't be fooled by heavily photoshopped, neon-bright internet pictures, though. The real mountain is a stunning canvas of soft, natural pastel earth tones.