Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Outside of California

    I spotted a town in Maryland called California. I’d known about it for awhile. It always seemed odd to have a town in one state named for another, especially one located an entire continent away. So I figured there must be a connection somewhere in there. Maybe it had roots in the California Gold Rush…

  • The Year in Geo-Adventures

    The final article of 2015 felt like an appropriate time to reflect upon my personal geographic sightseeing adventures during the past year. I accomplished a lot in 2015, more than typical, and I recalled my travels fondly. Plus I figured that readership always dropped way off during the slow week between Christmas and New Years.…

  • Arizona’s Wandering Capital

    The article I discovered was more than a year old, although it was new to me when I spotted it. The title intrigued me, Did You Know: Capital Of Arizona Moved 4 Times Before Settling In Phoenix. No, actually I didn’t know that. I’ve featured similar stories of wandering capitals for other states such as…

  • 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…

  • White House Christmas Tour

    Every once in awhile my proximity to the nation’s capital results in interesting opportunities. I got a chance to visit the White House somewhat by luck to see the 2015 Christmas decorations displayed for public viewing. This was the standard public tour — I’m no VIP just an average citizen — although it happened to…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Lowest Landlocked Elevation

    All sorts of interesting facts emerged as I mashed-up Wikipedia’s List of Elevation Extremes by Country with Landlocked Country. I wondered about the lowest elevation of a landlocked nation as I sorted through results in various ways. It turned out that there were several such countries with elevations below sea-level. Anybody could focus on elevation…

  • 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…

  • Center of Power

    Pioneers migrating into the central sections of the United States during the Nineteenth Century found a unique opportunity to shape their governance. Counties formed across the prairie in precise straight lines. Often they platted the local seat of government somewhere conveniently in the middle. Names bestowed upon these geographic slices frequently reflected prominent local businessmen…

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  5. Park ranger at Chalmette (New Orleans) Battlefield let me pull up the Union Jack 20 years ago. My dad would…