Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Nature

  • Big Ugly

    I’m working out the details for a short trip in March, a county counting adventure, although I haven’t determined all of the details yet and I’m not quite ready to share the objective. I’ll hit a personal milestone if everything works out as planned so I have plenty of motivation. Part of the drive will…

  • Lowest Landlocked Elevation

    All sorts of interesting facts emerged as I mashed-up Wikipedia’s List of Elevation Extremes by Country with Landlocked Country. I wondered about the lowest elevation of a landlocked nation as I sorted through results in various ways. It turned out that there were several such countries with elevations below sea-level. Anybody could focus on elevation…

  • Florida Highlands?

    I’ve been to Florida many times and always considered it to be incredibly flat. It’s one of the flattest of all states with a mean elevation of only 100 feet (30 metres). Only Delaware edges it out. It definitely represents the smallest elevation span within its borders, extending from sea level to only 345 ft…

  • The Only One, Part 2

    If it were Only One, how could there be a Part Two? I discarded that paradox and decided to plow forward anyway. The premise, to recap, was rather simple. I typed the exact phrase “The only one in [name of a country]” into various Internet search engines and observed the results. Part 2 focused on…

  • The Only One

    I started playing a little game over the weekend using a search engine and the exact phrase “The only one in [name of a country].” Much of the time this query resulted in lists of exotic automobiles for some odd reason, or vacation properties with excessive hyperbole. More amusing results floated to the surface every…

  • 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…

  • Center of the Nation, Part 4 (Terrain)

    There weren’t a lot of people on the Northern Plains and their settlements appeared only sporadically. Out there amongst the expansive void a place of a thousand residents qualified as a city and drivers might not see another one for an hour. I wondered, where did people even buy their groceries? That didn’t mean the…

  • More Ancient Rivers

    The readers of Twelve Mile Circle seemed to anticipate where this conversation might head when I wrote about the advanced age of the French Broad River recently. I’d actually intended to write a single article about really old rivers. Then I had to split it when it got too wordy. Naturally I’d seen that same…

  • Ancient River

    The recent Twelve Mile Circle journey to western North Carolina included one of my favorite activities, whitewater rafting. The boys were finally old enough to join us although we still kept it pretty easy on them. So we stuck primarily to a series of Class II and Class III rapids (moderate to intermediate). This made…

  • Western North Carolina, Part 1 (Asheville)

    Subscribers to the 12MC Twitter site likely noticed that I’ve been on vacation recently and probably already understood that it foreshadowed another travelogue. You’ll be happy with the next several articles if you like those. I was in Western North Carolina using Asheville as my base of operations for the week. I wasn’t sure exactly…