Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Terrain

  • Spit

    I’ve certainly featured spits of land on 12MC before. They’ve come up in the context of Shingle Spits and in a very specialized sense in one of my favorite geographic forms, the always wonderful tombolo. I was able to visit a particularly nice example of a spit in Homer, on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. I’ve discussed…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 6 (Signs)

    I thought I’d focus the final installment of the Riverboat Adventure on something a little more whimsical. Sometimes I have trouble remembering facts for a given place so I take photographs of informational signs. Usually this happens at historical sites. Sometimes signs provide greater explanation or context than what’s available on Internet pages. They serve…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 2 (Original Inhabitants)

    Long before Europeans and their descendants tagged the Lower Mississippi River valley with a cornucopia of artificial lines, forming states, and counties, and meridians and so forth, the area already had a remarkable human history. Native Americans left behind laboriously-constructed earthen mounds. Those served a variety of residential, ceremonial and funereal purposes all along the…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 1 (The River)

    12MC is back! Thank you for bearing with me while I took a brief respite from posting new articles. There were logistical reasons. Each race in the five state series took much of the morning, then we’d have to drive to the next location (stopping at geo-oddity sites along the way), arrive late each afternoon,…

  • Canada’s Pocket Desert

    Canada allegedly contains exactly one lonely desert, or maybe none at all. It depends on who you consult. They’ve also coined various names for the anomaly known colloquially as “Canada’s Pocket Desert” including Okanagan, Osoyoos and Nk’mip. Whatever the designation, it’s located adjacent to the Town of Osoyoos in southern British Columbia. So it sits…

  • Kiloanomaly

    What does one call a thousand geo-oddities? Ultimately I decided to use the metric prefix “Kilo,” although kilogeooddity and kilooddity both looked clunky with all of those extra vowels. Ultimately I coined the phrase kiloanomaly, equating to units of a thousand objects combining to form singular anomalies. It almost sounded like a Hawaiian word. I…

  • Gary Coleman on the Grassy Knoll

    The search engine query landed like an explosion on Twelve Mile Circle, hoping to uncover the ultimate in unlikely conspiracy theories, “Gary Coleman on the Grassy Knoll.” Yet, the article you are reading right now is the first time that Mr. Coleman ever appeared on this blog. I couldn’t remember any other occasion, and I…

  • Menacing Island

    I spied an island full of deviants. What else could explain a cluster of geographic features with names such as Freak, Lunatic, Menace, Germ, Moron, Filthy and Maniac? I plotted my discoveries along with several other bizarre placenames I’d encountered within a single map. This included the only spot in the United States named, and…

  • Boomerang

    The trails and breadcrumbs left behind by random one-time electronic visitors sometimes remind me of interesting things I’ve discussed previously and forgotten. Witness the recent query “boomerang” that led one anonymous reader to Fraser Island in Australia, the world’s largest sand island, and its amazing perched dune lakes. As I noted when I drafted the…

  • Countdown to Midnight

    Today I following the normal progression of articles as they post on Twelve Mile Circle. I felt somewhat obligated to publish an article even though it fell on New Years Eve. Yes, I can’t stop even on New Years Eve. Readers in Europe and places farther east won’t see this until 2014. They’ve already flipped…