Category: Nature
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Make My Trip, Again
Twelve Mile Circle picks a different state for its vacation each summer, and concentrates on an aspect of it intensely. Previous examples have included Alaska, Utah, and Oregon. The ultimate purpose of these holidays is to focus on unusual or oft-overlooked sites within the United States while sprinkling-in a few of the more famous sites…
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Dust Bowl Adventure, Part 5 (Epilogue)
It’s good to be back home. However, I will always cherish my brief journey to the Dust Bowl territory of the lower Great Plains. I enjoyed and appreciated the beauty of the emptiness, the towns appearing fifteen miles distant first noticeable by their distinctive grain elevators, dodging and getting caught in clouds of dust, and…
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Dust Bowl Adventure, Part 2 (Sea of Grass)
An odd feature of my Dust Bowl trip is that I drive for hours with little or nothing to see beyond the awesome natural beauty of the Great Plains until it’s punctuated by a tightly-bound space overflowing with geographic anomalies and historical sites. One such place is Morton County in the far southwestern corner of…
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Chicken Scratch
Chicken scratch serves as an informal term for illegible handwriting. It is also a type of chicken feed that’s typically strewn upon the ground. Chickens then scratch around the dirt in pursuit of feed, leaving claw marks behind. I suppose illegible handwriting might be thought to resemble the results of hungry chickens foraging for cracked…
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Atlantis Lite
I’ve been thinking about towns submerged by reservoirs. I don’t know why that suddenly came to mind or why it fascinated me without prompting. It’s one of those things. This is also a topic that interests many other people apparently. They’ve written all sorts of definitive lists of underwater ghost towns. I won’t replicate those…
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Christmas Fluff
Who reads 12MC on Christmas Day? Right. It’s just you and me today. Throw another log on the fire and don’t expect anything requiring research. This leaves me in a bit of a conundrum. I usually post an article on Tuesday. I suppose I could take the day off which would be a sane and…
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How Invasive
I had a conversation recently with my friend the birder. He pointed out various bird species that happened to fly within line-of-site of our gathering, while noting which ones were native species and which ones were transplants. That led to discussions of various invasive animals introduced into North America either by accident or by design,…
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Connecticut Extremes: Humidity and Humility
The Extreme Connecticut Geo-Tour began a day early for me with a seven-hour drive from the Washington, DC area to a hotel in Avon, CT that I used as my home base. I timed the drive well, managing to avoid various rush hours along a nefarious traffic corridor. Then I shot an email to Steve…
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Connecticut Extremes: Appetizer
Merriam-Webster includes various definitions of appetizer including: “something that stimulates a desire for more (a literary appetizer).” That’s what I’m serving this evening, a Connecticut Geo-Oddities Appetizer. I took a bunch of photographs of signs during my recent adventure and I thought I might offer them to the 12MC audience as a quiz. How many…
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Around the Bend
We’re spending a great portion of our adventure in and around the vicinity of Bend, Oregon. We’ve rented a house for the week and we’re using as our home base. That has provided us with a sense of normalcy and a means to travel to numerous outdoor destinations while minimizing travel time. Once again, the…