The pyramids of Egypt. Mount Rushmore. The Great Wall of China. The Grand Canyon. The Taj Mahal. These are some of the most well-known tourist destinations around the world.

How about Bubblegum Alley, the sonorous stones of Ringing Rocks Park or the Gates of Hell? These are some of the lesser known points of interest you can visit on the website AtlasObscura.com. The site is full of unusual, off-the-beaten-path attractions.

Bubblegum Alley is just what it sounds like. An alley in San Luis Obispo, California, where the walls are completely covered to a height of 15 feet in discarded chewing gum — some of it decades old. Ringing Rocks Park is a field of boulders in southeast Pennsylvania that emit musical tones when struck. The Gates of Hell is a fiery crater in Turkmenistan. It is several hundred feet across and has been burning since 1971 when a Soviet gas-drilling rig plunged into a massive cavern of natural gas.

Atlas Obscura is the creation of Joshua Foer, a science journalist, best-selling author and former United States Memory Champion, and Dylan Thuras, a traveler and seeker of the unusual. Their shared fascination with the hidden wonders of the world was the catalyst for them to start a website designed to make others aware of wondrous and curious places. Many more mainstream sites are featured as well.

Navigating the Atlas

The site has several ways to navigate through its content. The home page features a slide show that displays various locations. Clicking on an image or its caption takes you to a page with more information and pictures.

If you scroll down on the home page, you come to a gallery of images with three tabs at the top: Recently Added, Most Visited, and Popular. Each clickable image in the galleries has a brief description of the attraction.

Scrolling down further takes you to a section labeled Articles. A featured photo and story dominate this section. To its right is a tabbed column of smaller pictures featuring recent or popular articles. The articles are typically lengthier descriptions of places with more photos included.

Below the Articles section is a collection of curious facts presented in a rebus-like fashion. Clicking on the pictorial riddle takes you to the featured page.

At the bottom of the home page is an explanation of what Atlas Obscura is all about.

Back up at the top of the page, there are links to other areas of the website. The Places link takes you to an image gallery similar to the one on the home page. You can click through pages of galleries looking for sites of interest.

The Articles link goes to the same content as the Articles section on the home page, but it’s presented in a different layout.

The Events link reveals a gallery of tours of interesting places led by agents of Atlas Obscura. For instance, next Friday you can go on a tour of the tunnels and atriums of midtown Manhattan. It promises an impressive array of art, architecture and history located in tunnels and passageways hidden in the midst of the bustling heart of New York City.

Other links connect to random places of interest, an About Us section, a sign-in page and social media sites. There are also a couple of links that allow you to submit your own interesting places to the site for consideration.

Good-looking site

Atlas Obscura is a very nicely designed website. It has an attractive logo, a nice color palette and clean, unified typography. The navigation is functional and intuitive. The photography is of professional quality, and the artwork is well done and fits the visual style of the site.

The writing is good but could use some better editing, as there are many typos. The writing style is a bit informal, but it establishes a distinct personality. The research on some of the sites appears lax, so links to more information would be nice.

Kevin O'Neill is a staff artist for The Times-Tribune. Share your favorite websites and apps with him at koneill@timesshamrock.com.