National Geographic Traveler’s Senior Photo Editor, Dan Westergren, has the distinct pleasure (and sometimes pain) of choosing which photographs run in the magazine. The award-winning photographers assigned to our stories come back from the field with such a rich variety of images that it can be hard, if not impossible, to make the final cut.

So we asked Dan to make an even tougher call: out of all the photos that ran in every single issue of Traveler this year, which ten were his favorites and why?