Tag: National Forest

  • The Big Obsidian Flow

    Deschutes County, Oregon, USA (July 2012) The Big Obsidian Flow has an appropriate albeit unimaginative name for this geological structure in central Oregon, just east of the Cascades. It is indeed a big obsidian flow. It forms part of the vast Newberry National Volcanic Monument, founded in 1990 within the Deschutes National Forest, and specifically…

  • Minnetonka Cave

    Caribou-Targhee National Forest , Bear Lake, Idaho, USA (July 2011) We’d heard about Minnetonka Cave while we were visiting Bear Lake and decided to check it out. It’s set high within the Bear Lake Range in Cache National Forest (administered by the Montpelier Ranger District of the Caribou-Targhee National Forest) at an altitude of 7,700…

  • Shell Falls and Devils Tower

    Northern Wyoming (June 1992) Shell Falls We cut across northern Wyoming on Route 14 as we gradually began our Bighorn Mountains ascent. These mountains formed about 60 million years ago as the land forced upward. Erosion slowly scraped away the sedimentary rock in many places, leaving behind the harder granite beneath it. We entered the…

  • Russian River Falls

    Chugach National Forest, Cooper Landing, Alaska (July 2010) Right at the middle of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, just off Sterling Highway west of Cooper Landing, the Russian River Falls put on a spectacular show for those who follow a gentle trail through the woods (map). It’s not amazing because of any great vertical drops. No, the…

  • Sawtooth Elsewhere

    A sawtooth may not exist in Rhode Island. Nonetheless, I found plenty of others sawtooths (sawteeth?) elsewhere throughout the English-speaking world. That provided a wonderful opportunity to continue on a theme. Additionally it offered a chance to choose advantageous locations. By that I meant I decided to fill empty spots on the Complete Index map…

  • Checkerboarding

    Checkerboarding has nothing to do with the game of checkers other than bearing a striking resemblance to its playing surface. Nor is it some awful new interrogation technique invented to pry information from suspects under duress. It is this. I discovered the anomaly on Google Maps in Oregon awhile ago while discussing Latitude Longitude Sequences…

  • Why THIS Spot?

    What does this mean to you? n 45°55.145′ w 090°05.011′ That’s what the query said when I spotted it in my blog access logs. What an oddly precise item to drop into a search engine. The visitor came to Twelve Mile Circle by following a Google link, one of only five in existence. You know…