Hi, I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places. A little while ago, we asked you all to tell us about the wonders

in your backyard. And we got a message from one of our listeners, Dominic Tuttle, about a wonder that used to be

in his backyard in the little town of Aztec, New Mexico. Astec has about 7,000 people. Dominic says

there wasn't much to do growing up, a museum, a library, and his favorite, the Aztec ruins.

Dominic doesn't live in Aztec anymore, but he still thinks about the ruins.

Here he is.

The first time I went to the ruins, I was five years old in kindergarten. And we had a local community project that occurred in Farmington, New Mexico, nearby.

The community college, where I would go on to attend 13 years later.

Every year they do Illuminadia display.

They're basically

brown paper lunch bags, and you put

a layer about an inch of sand at the bottom,

and then a candle inside.

And then

at night you like the candle, and it makes the bag glow.

They have a couple of different names, but locally in our area, they were Luminati's.

And the local community college would set up tens of thousands of them across the campus.

And then you could walk through. It's incredible sight.

So leading up to that, all of the local elementary schools in the

county would have their classes put sand into bags just to save some of that labor so as a five-year-old

I got to jump on a bus with my kindergarten class and go to the Aztec ruins where they had the bags set up and we scooped some sand

...