From the very beginning, more than 10 years ago, Atlas Obscura has been driven by our community. One of the early user-created entries in our database of wondrous places—published just a few months after we launched in 2009, by username “bertieinindia”—was The Root Bridges of Cherrapunji, a series of centuries-old bridges grown from the tangled roots of Ficus elastica trees. There was so little published about the bridges at the time that it took work to even confirm they were real and that, as bertieinindia told us, they were under…
