Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • U.S. States’ Lowest County Highpoints

    The setup might take a little explanation. I wanted to find the lowest county highpoint in each of the fifty United States. There would only be one per state based upon a series of lists provided by Peakbagger.com. That might lead to speculation that a better solution would involve examining all county highpoints regardless of…

  • Sunrise

    Strange queries land on Twelve Mile Circle. Recently I noticed search engines referencing questions in the form of “does the sun rise (or set) in [name a location].” and sending them to the site. Since I’m pretty sure those would be daily events for most of us except perhaps at extreme latitudes during very specific…

  • Insignificant Synonyms

    I sometimes used synonyms or euphemisms for small, inconsequential places. They even find their way into Twelve Mile Circle articles occasionally. They were just generic terms for middle of nowhere spots where nothing every happened and nothing ever would for the remaining history of the known universe. However, they didn’t really exist. Or did they?…

  • My Smallest Park

    Twelve Mile Circle published a very rare guest post in March 2011 discussing Geo-Oddities of Portland, Oregon. It featured several unusual items including the famous Mill Ends Park (map). The Notion Readers might be familiar with the spot. It’s garnered a lot of attention from mainstream sources over the years because of its diminutive size.…

  • Cactus

    The previous article about Spanish punctuation embedded in various place names in the United States made my mind wander to the Desert Southwest. Then it led me down a mental tangent related to cacti for some unknown reason. As I daydreamed, I considered, perhaps I should examine places named cactus. There weren’t many, and even…

  • Officially Tilde

    I received a message recently from a 12MC reader in Cañon City, Colorado. I couldn’t help noticing the tilde, the little squiggle over the letter “ñ.” That of course was punctuation used in Spanish, not English, so it caught my eye. Very few places in the United States include diacritical marks recognized officially by the…

  • Turpan Depression

    Are you ready for another installment in my occasional series on lowpoints? I am. Everyone always focuses on the greatest of mountains and the highest of elevations. Lowpoints need a little love too, especially those below sea level, and the further down the better. I turned my attention to China, a nation that does not…

  • More Geo-BREWities

    My geography and brewery interests collided a few months ago. The happy result produced Geo-Brewities. Apparently Google says I own that term now, a pseudo-portmanteau of geography + brewery + oddities. I don’t expect it to become part of the popular lexicon. It’s not that catchy. Developing the List I took a different approach on…

  • Overheard in Mexico

    A Wikipedia page caught my attention lately, an article on the Languages of Mexico. Spanish naturally came to mind and the vast majority of its 120 million citizens do speak that. I figured there were probably a number of indigenous languages as well and that was likewise true. For example at least a million people…

  • Mapillary

    I noticed a tweet from a Twelve Mile Circle reader a few months ago that mentioned Mapillary. I can’t recall who that was although he or she deserves my appreciation. Since then I’ve been watching Mapillary from a distance and I’ve become increasingly intrigued by its possibilities. 12MC almost never features individual websites. This is…

Latest Comments

  1. The British flag continues to fly at Roche Harbor, a couple miles north of English Camp.

  3. Been there Once for a few years. In 76 &77. Ran cooperative store. Even though it was very isolated It…

  4. As an Alaskan I always wondered why Interstates were a big deal. From my point of view a road went…