Category: U.S. States
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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…
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Lowest Landlocked Elevation – US States
The analysis of landlocked national lowpoints amused me so much that I decided to extend the exercise. So I switched to individual states within the United States. Once again I found a perfectly matching Wikipedia page so I didn’t have to recreate my own. Behold: a List of U.S. states and territories by elevation. Only…
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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…
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State Nickname Streets
I focused an inordinate amount of time and attention on Wikipedia’s List of U.S. State Nicknames as I wrote the Comparison Nicknames article. That wasn’t the original intent of the effort however, just an interesting byproduct that spun into its own topic. I’d been working on something else, something finally revealed today. It all began…
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Comparison Nicknames
I enjoyed reading Wikipedia’s List of U.S. State Nicknames recently. My amusement didn’t come from the familiar nicknames I already knew, rather it derived from the nicknames I never knew existed. Alabama was the Lizard State? Really? Did anyone else know that? Then I noticed that several of the states featured nicknames that compared them…
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Airport Visits
All that talk of doughnut county captures and airport-only visits in Counting Down a few days ago led me to consider that I’d been to a lot of airports during my wanderings over the years. One would think that I would have counted all of those before, seeing how I make lists of just about…
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Counting Down
Most comments on Twelve Mile Circle are made to articles written recently, primarily to those posted within the past few days. That doesn’t prevent readers from commenting on older articles though. I leave the comment window open indefinitely. People wander their way to the site however they manage to do it, and I assume most…
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Center of the Nation, Part 2 (States and Counties)
Transporting a participant through a grueling six day, six state race series created a huge benefit for a geo-geek such as myself, the inherent need to cover a lot of territory. I’d driven through parts of the target area previously on a cross-country trip many years ago. I’d completed the typical tourist trek through the…
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Center of the Nation, Part 1 (Center?)
I returned from my much-anticipated Center of the Nation journey about a week ago. Those readers who followed the 12MC Twitter already received a steady dose of foreshadowing about this event. It’s my final installment from the 2015 Twelve Mile Circle “season of travel.” I took a lot of great trips over the last several…
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Geographically Coded Plates
Recently I spotted an automobile with a Nebraska license plate, or more properly a “vehicle registration plate” I suppose. That wasn’t an everyday occurrence here in the Mid-Atlantic more than 1,100 miles (1,770 kilometres) from that Midwestern state. Often I’ve wondered what would bring a driver such a long distance from his home after I’ve…