Thousand Needles

Thousand Needles is a sprawling canyon of sheer sandstone pillars and sunbaked salt pans in southern Kalimdor. Tauren tribes cling to settlements atop towering mesas to escape aggressive centaur packs, while gnomish and goblin tinkerers run high-speed rocket cars across the dried-up seabed of the Shimmering Flats.

Before the Great Sundering shattered ancient Kalimdor, this territory was a lush river canyon fed by inland waterways flowing out toward the sea. The cataclysm tore the continent apart, thrusting the riverbed above the water table and altering the river's path until only dry stone and sandstone spires remained. Today, dozens of slender cylindrical columns rise from the canyon floor like a petrified forest. Tauren settled on the summits, stringing precarious rope bridges between peaks to establish villages out of reach of the hostile centaur marauders patrolling the shadow-draped canyon floor below.