Americans are funny. We’ll complain if have to walk all the way to the sidewalk to take out the trash, or drive a friend to the airport. And yet we’ll drive hundreds of miles into the desert to see a completely arbitrary point and take pictures of ourselves standing on top of a small metal disk where nothing ever happened. We feel as if we’ve accomplished something important, standing in four states at once. But have we really? It turns out that the famed Four Corners Monument isn’t even in the right place.

View Four Corners Monument in a larger map

The “Four Corners,” where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico meet, is the only quadripoint of its kind in the United States. Canada has had its own Four Corners since 1999, when the new territory of Nunavut was carved out of the Northwest Territories. There probably hasn’t been an international quadripoint since 1961, though there’s some disagreement about one in southern Africa.

So it is a fairly rare geographical oddity, which helps explain why Four Corners gets over 250,000 visitors a year. It’s been cannily promoted as a tourist destination by the Navajo Nation, which owns the site and sells admission, frybread, and turquoise necklaces. Visitors line up in the hot sun to stand on the bronze-and-granite circle and attempt an awkward pose that will put them in all four states at the same time.

The Four Corners quadripoint dates back to the Civil War, when some residents of the vast New Mexico Territory tried to split off a new territory called Arizona—and join the Confederacy. Confederate maps show Arizona and New Mexico as a stack of two flat territories, divided north and south, but when the Union won the war, they elected to separate Arizona and New Mexico east and west, by continuing the Utah-Colorado border all the way down to Mexico. All these borders were defined as straight lines of latitude and longitude (which, incidentally, were measured not from the Prime Meridian at Greenwich, England, but from the zero meridian commonly used on American maps of the time: Washington, D.C.)