Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Nature

  • Wisconsin’s Great River Road, Day 1

    My recent discussion of the Great River Road was a bit of a setup. We took a short journey along Wisconsin’s portion of the road, and into Iowa over the weekend. The scenery along the bluffs of the Mississippi River could only be described as spectacular; soaring cliffs towering over the ever-changing nature of the…

  • England’s Desert

    England has a desert? When I think desert, I normally envision cacti, sand, camels and that sort of thing, but that’s an inaccurate and stereotypical point of view. A desert doesn’t require scorching heat. Antarctica qualifies as a desert. Some sources even claim that even England has a desert. It is located at Dungeness, a…

  • Inconvenient Rivers

    Those pesky rivers! People go to great trouble to designate a river as a boundary, decide who has ownership or how it will be split, draw all those maps, and then the river has the audacity to jump its bank and form a new channel. Does this mean the boundary automatically changes too? Of course…

  • Lowest Elevation in Nepal

    This is Mount Everest (map), a topic way to obvious for the Twelve Mile Circle to consider. What could I add? Everyone knows about it, every map of the area shows it, and resources galore focus on its magnificence. Its national attitudinal opposite, however — the lowest elevation in Nepal — is a different story…

  • The Largest Smallest US County (a.k.a. it sucks getting old)

    Did yesterday’s dispatch seem a little shorter than usual? That’s because it was half the length I’d intended. To summarize briefly, each of the fifty United States has a smallest and a largest county. Yesterday I featured the largest of those smallest counties. Today I’ll take the opposite tack and present the smallest of the…

  • The Coldest I’ve Ever Been in my Life

    This has been an amazing weather year for me. I’ve survived blistering heat in the Arizona desert, disastrous floods in the Upper Midwest, and now bone chilling cold. I could never have imagined 2008 would bring both the highest and lowest temperature extremes in my life thus far: 111°f/44°c last summer and -10°f/-23°c this winter.…

  • Wyndham Winter Warmer

    It’s been chilly lately at Twelve Mile Circle as winter approaches. Perhaps some warm thoughts will help me get through these cold evenings. I need to take my mind to the hottest spot on the planet. I might consider the place with the highest absolute recorded temperature. That would be Al ‘Aziziyah, Libya on September…

  • West Coast Sunrises over Water

    We’ve had fun watching the comments posted on my recent entry, East Coast Sunsets over Water. Matthew kicked things off when he wondered whether the opposite condition might exist. Does a West Coast sunrise ever happen over water? Scott Schrantz who has followed the Twelve Mile Circle for awhile, later solved the mystery by providing…

  • East Coast Sunsets over Water

    We all have visions of a romantic Hollywood movie with a classic California scene. Naturally it includes a vibrant sunset over calm Pacific waters. I recall a conversation I had a number of years ago with a west coast native. He raved about those sunsets with an air of superiority. Obviously people on the east…

  • Highest and Lowest, Oh So Close

    California contains both the highest and lowest elevations of the continental United States. Well, the “Lower 48” more precisely. Astoundingly, they are less than 88 miles (142 kilometers) apart with an elevation change approaching 15,000 feet. Mount Whitney is the California Highpoint at 14,494 feet (4,418 meters) above sea level. It crowns the mighty Sierra…