Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Terrain

  • Great Allegheny Passage, Day 1 (Pittsburgh to West Newton)

    I fretted about my upcoming bicycle trek along the Great Allegheny Passage trail. My attitude got stuck somewhere between nervousness and fear. I’d never attempted anything like it before, a 150 mile (240 kilometre) rails-to-trails ride between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cumberland, Maryland. Confronting My Fears Every time I conquered a fear I created a new…

  • How Tautological

    Previously I noted the inherent redundancy of places named River Ouse in England. The literal translation worked out to something like Water River or even River River. Similar repetitions occurred likewise wherever one language overlapped another. That happened as new settlers migrated into territory occupied and named previously by earlier cultures. Then I found a…

  • Highpoint to Lowpoint

    Twelve Mile Circle received an intriguing question from reader “Cary” a few days ago. Cary, a professional mapmaker, noticed something interesting while conducting research: the amazing proximity of Minnesota’s highest point of elevation to its lowest. This led to a natural question. Was this the shortest distance between a state highpoint and a lowpoint? I’d…

  • Good Fortuna

    Fortuna was the Roman goddess of prosperity and luck. That would be an excellent name for any location hoping for some of that mojo rub off. I was aware of a Fortuna in California (map), probably the largest Fortuna in the United States. People there lived in the heart of redwood country. I’m sure it’s…

  • County Divided

    Look to the far northwestern corner of North Dakota, right up next to Canada and Montana. There sits a county with a curious name, Divide (map). It appeared somewhat rectangular like many other counties on the sparsely-populated Great Plains. Few natural features could take the place of arbitrary straight lines in this emptiness. I’d encountered…

  • Going Postal, Part 2

    As I mentioned in Part 1, the first installment dealt with physical post offices and this one will focus on methods of postal delivery. Both featured examples drawn primarily from the United States Postal Service’s “fun facts” page. Mule Pack animals would seem to be an antiquated method of mail delivery. Certainly horses, mules or…

  • Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah

    I pondered Zip Lines recently. Actually I’d been researching postal ZIP Codes and wondering how I’d missed the 50th Birthday of the system in 2013. Then I noticed an auto-suggestion for Zip Lines and it zipped me straight down a protracted tangent metaphorically speaking. I decided to find the longest Zip Line in the world,…

  • Particularly Possessive

    I noticed that Prince George’s County, Queen Anne’s County and St. Mary’s County — all in Maryland — included the genitive apostrophe to form their possessive constructions. I’d always taken it on faith that the United States Board on Geographic Names disallowed apostrophes for that specific purpose. That’s how we ended-up with Harpers Ferry and…

  • Seriously Broken

    The number of broken place names seemed amazing. I didn’t know what led people to memorialize broken objects, just noted that they they did and it amused me. Broken Lakes, Broken Ridges, Broken Points, Broken Valleys and on and on. The list was so exhaustive that I had a terrible time limiting my selection. So…

  • Now You See It, Now You Don’t

    I thought about rivers, specifically those with segments that disappeared for awhile. It wasn’t about completely subterranean rivers although those were certainly fascinating in their own right. Rather, it was about surface rivers with underground components. I knew they existed because I had a hazy recollection of reading about one once. How rare were they,…