There are places on this planet that live sort of at the edge between the real and the unreal.

Places so extreme that it's hard to square them with any normal life.

The center of a 600 foot wide tornado whipping across the Oklahoma Plains.

A lava lake bubbling with newly formed magma. Or for example, a 600,000-year-old

cave bursting with crystals the size of a school bus.

And it looks like Superman's Fortress of Solitude.

There are these white selenite crystal that's crystallized gypsum and they are the size of tree trunks.

Some of them are 10 meters 30 feet long weighing 55 tons.

They look like gigantic tree trunks,

and it looked like this magical alien place.

I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Obscura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today we're headed deep underground to the cave of the crystals, located nearly a thousand feet beneath northern Mexico,

and we'll meet a professional adventurer who spends his time

chasing the edge of the unreal. The Do you want to just list a few places that you've traveled in your line of work?

Oh, jeez, I'm sure.

I'm the very first person to have ever descended down

into the Darvazaa flaming crater, the gates of hell.

I did the world's first ever rope traverse over top of the boiling lake in Dominica.

Chase the world's largest tornado 2.6 miles wide that was in Oklahoma. I was in the middle of Hurricane Sandy Hurricane Katrina

all over the place basically yeah this is my career I'm a professional explorer and

adventurer that's that's what it says on my business card that's that's what it says on my business card.

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