Category: Terrain
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Lowest Positive Elevation
My examination of landlocked nations was only partially completed after the Lowest Landlocked Elevation article. Cracks in the earth were forbidding, often hellish places and I wanted to see how the next stack of nations differed, the landlocked places above sea level by the slimmest of margins. In contrast, those lowpoints tended to occur where…
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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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Surprise!
A visitor landed on Twelve Mile Circle from Surprise. That was the actual name of the town; Surprise, Arizona. Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me. More than a hundred thousand people lived there, yet I’d never heard of it. I also learned during my search that Surprise was a surprisingly common designation. Some 238 surprises…
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More Endorheic in Europe
I have a mild obsession with endorheic basins. Those are magical places where water flows into them and never flows out except through evaporation. They’ve appeared several times on the pages of Twelve Mile Circle over the years. I’ve even discussed an example in Europe before, Lake Neusiedl on the border between Austria and Hungary.…
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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…
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Center of the Nation, Part 3 (Trails)
Evidence of earlier migrations appeared as we rolled along our Center of the Nation journey. It evoked a time when people crossed these High Plains without benefit of motors. Initially the migration involved early Nineteenth Century explorers and hunters of European descent pushing from the East Coast into lands long settled by Native Americans. Then…
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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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Columbus Name Symmetry, Part 2
It doesn’t take much to please Twelve Mile Circle and I’d been particularly fascinated by the first name / surname symmetry of Cristóbal, Colón, Panamá. Never one to stop beating that dead horse I considered that Christopher Columbus had lots of other places named for him that remained unexplored. Certainly there must be plenty of…
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Western North Carolina, Part 5 (Exclamation Point)
Twelve Mile Circle faced a bit of a geographic dilemma in western North Carolina. An issue began to appear towards the end of the week. Indeed, I might risk a doughnut hole county if I wasn’t careful. That condition would occur if I counted a bunch of contiguous counties and then left one in the…
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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…