Heshigten Global Geopark sprawls across 1,750 square kilometers of Inner Mongolia's Hexigten Banner, about 400 kilometers north of Beijing and 210 kilometers northwest of Chifeng City. It sits at a geological crossroads where the Greater Khingan Mountains meet the Yan Mountains and the Hunshandake Sandland pushes in from the southwest. The collision belt of the North China Platform and the Xingmeng Geosyncline runs through the territory, creating a landscape where volcanic plugs stand beside glacial cirques, hot springs bubble near sand dunes, and a river canyon cuts through terrain that was once the homeland of the Khitan people. Designated a National Geopark in 2001 and a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2005, it gathers eight separate areas of geological significance under one administrative umbrella.

The Arshihaty granite forest in the park's northern reaches is its most dramatic feature. Frost splitting, freeze-thaw cycles, and wind erosion have carved granite bedrock into towering columns with a distinctive horizontal segmentation -- layers visible in the stone like pages in a book left standing on end. A few kilometers away, the Qingshan granite mortars present a completely different geological spectacle. Over 300 glacial potholes, called giant's kettles, pit a two-square-kilometer area with round basins ranging from half a meter to several meters across. They were formed during the Quaternary period, when meltwater swirled in eddies powerful enough to drill into solid rock. The resulting shapes -- pots, jars, spoons, buckets, basins -- look like the workshop of some impossibly large potter.

Dali Nur lake anchors the park's western section, its shores ringed by volcanic features. The Dali Nur volcanic group includes a basalt plateau and the remnant plugs of extinct volcanoes that once formed islands when the lake was larger. As water levels dropped, these plugs became isolated hills standing above the grassland like sentinels. To the east, Mount Huanggangliang -- the highest peak in the Greater Khingan range at 2,029 meters -- preserves island-like pockets of permafrost above 1,500 meters, remnants of the last glaciation clinging to existence in a warming world. The Reshuitang thermal springs in the park's eastern section offer the opposite extreme: mineral-rich hot water rising from deep underground, evidence of the heat that still simmers beneath this geologically active landscape.

The Xar Moron River -- the Xilamulun in Chinese -- flows northeast through Hexigten Banner, passing through the territory where the Khitan people originated before founding the Liao dynasty in the 10th century. In the park's southwestern corner, the river has carved a deep canyon that locals call a grand canyon, its walls exposing millions of years of geological history in stratified rock. But the park's most sobering feature may be the Hunshandake Sandland, one of China's four largest sand lands. Covering 53,000 square kilometers, it is an ecologically fragile zone where overgrazing triggered rapid desertification: between the 1960s and 2000, the fraction of Hunshandake covered by sand dunes expanded from 2 percent to 33 percent. The park area on Dali Nur's south shore preserves a landscape in transition, where dunes encroach on grassland in a slow-motion demonstration of what happens when the balance between land use and ecology tips.