Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Latitude

  • Great Salt Lake Meridian & Base

    Salt Lake City, Utah, USA (July 2011) There is so much to see and do at Salt Lake City’s Temple Square and the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is the home of the Salt Lake Temple and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It boast inspirational architecture on an epic scale,…

  • Midnight Sun

    Municipality of Anchorage, Alaska, USA (July 2000) Why would I post this image of a nondescript suburban street lined with generic chain stores that could be anywhere USA? …Because this is Anchorage, Alaska and it’s nearly midnight. I was in Anchorage on business in early July 2000, just a few days after the summer solstice.…

  • Ends of Canada

    My Ends of the Earth wandering reminded me of an earlier Google Street View quest. A long time ago, way back in 2010, Twelve Mile Circle included an article I called The Shack at the End of the Road. This marked the northernmost extreme of Street View coverage in Canada at that time. I wondered…

  • Alaska’s Southernmost Mainland Airport

    Thank goodness for random search queries that land on Twelve Mile Circle. This time our unknown visitor wanted to find Alaska’s southernmost mainland airport. I don’t know why they wanted to learn that and it didn’t really matter. It became an intellectual exercise, and considerably more complicated than I expected. I’m not completely confident in…

  • Center of the Nation, Part 5 (Wildlife)

    My route crossed paths with all sorts of wildlife, some more wild than others as we rolled through endless terrain in a land largely devoid of people. We never pushed deep into backcountry so I didn’t see anything too exotic — and no rattlesnakes thank goodness, which were supposedly quite common — still our roadside…

  • Good Fortuna

    Fortuna was the Roman goddess of prosperity and luck. That would be an excellent name for any location hoping for some of that mojo rub off. I was aware of a Fortuna in California (map), probably the largest Fortuna in the United States. People there lived in the heart of redwood country. I’m sure it’s…

  • Going Postal, Part 1

    I alluded to postal ZIP codes in the recent Zip Lines and I’ll carry that theme through the next couple of articles. I’d stumbled upon the United States Postal Service’s Fun Facts. Someday maybe I’ll explore what exactly makes a fact “fun” although for now I think I’ll simply steal liberally from that page and…

  • The Odd Case of Iowa’s Largest County

    I had a fascinating Twitter conversation with Steve from Connecticut Museum Quest recently. He has a much more interesting Twitter feed @CTMQ than my mundane @TheReal12MC. Seriously, I don’t have much to say on Twitter other than using it to announce each new article and maybe posting a few beer pictures occasionally. A few people…

  • 81 on 81

    I’m planning a quick trip down to southwestern Virginia and neighboring West Virginia. Naturally I intend to count some new counties along the way although with other purposes too. I wish I could say it was entirely about the counties so I could finally finish Virginia. But that will have to wait for another day.…

  • Skewed Perspective

    There was a time in the early days of Twelve Mile Circle when I used to devote entire articles to differences in distances that didn’t seem plausible, although of course the actual measurements didn’t lie. For example, sticking with the Twelve theme, the twelfth article I ever posted on 12MC all the way back in…