Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Geography Ablaze

    Loyal reader Ken has attended Burning Man a number of times and suggested I highlight some of the geographic quirks associated with it. He was even kind enough to provide the topics! I’ve never experienced Burning Man so I was grateful to begin this article with a pre-packaged outline. All of the ideas below came…

  • Footloose

    I thought I’d sliced-and-diced my county counting exploits in every way imaginable by the time I posted Counting Down, my account of barely crossed and airport only captures. Loyal reader and fellow county counter Andy begged to differ. He discovered one more dimension when he noted, “Probably 99% of what you or I color in…

  • Eric Henn Murals

    A couple of articles featured Circleville, Ohio earlier this year, Square the Circle and Circleville Survived. I’d honed in on this otherwise nondescript town because anything with a circle was fair game for Twelve Mile Circle. And I actually discovered a few fascinating tidbits, confirming once again that geo-oddities existed everywhere. One such item included…

  • Comparison Nicknames

    I enjoyed reading Wikipedia’s List of U.S. State Nicknames recently. My amusement didn’t come from the familiar nicknames I already knew, rather it derived from the nicknames I never knew existed. Alabama was the Lizard State? Really? Did anyone else know that? Then I noticed that several of the states featured nicknames that compared them…

  • More Endorheic in Europe

    I have a mild obsession with endorheic basins. Those are magical places where water flows into them and never flows out except through evaporation. They’ve appeared several times on the pages of Twelve Mile Circle over the years. I’ve even discussed an example in Europe before, Lake Neusiedl on the border between Austria and Hungary.…

  • Airports in the District of Columbia

    Let’s refer back to the Airport Visits article. At that time I claimed that no airport existed within the physical boundaries of the District of Columbia. So unfortunately that would block me from ever traveling through airports in every state/territory/district in the United States. However, I want to put a little asterisk next to the…

  • Airport Visits

    All that talk of doughnut county captures and airport-only visits in Counting Down a few days ago led me to consider that I’d been to a lot of airports during my wanderings over the years. One would think that I would have counted all of those before, seeing how I make lists of just about…

  • Oglala Lakota County

    I pointed out that the the Wade Hampton Census Area in Alaska became the Kusilvak Census Area in a recent Reader Mailbag article. Alaska’s census areas exists as a unique construct. They serve as a convenient parceling of the Unorganized Borough while being considered “county equivalents” by the Federal government for a number of statistical…

  • Counting Down

    Most comments on Twelve Mile Circle are made to articles written recently, primarily to those posted within the past few days. That doesn’t prevent readers from commenting on older articles though. I leave the comment window open indefinitely. People wander their way to the site however they manage to do it, and I assume most…

  • Center of the Nation, Part 6 (Inspirations)

    I made it to the final installment of the Center of the Nation articles at long last. I hope the Twelve Mile Circle audience enjoyed riding along vicariously. I included links to all of the previous articles at the bottom of the page for those who may have missed a few. I figured I’d wrap…

Latest Comments

  1. That was its original range before people spread it all around. Now it’s in lots of different places, including Oklahoma.

  2. I think that range needs to be expanded greatly. I’m in the Oklahoma City area and those are fairly prevalent…

  3. The law in the 1800s when most of the countries was being broke down into smaller one stated that you…

  5. Hi Mr. Howder — Just going from memory, I recall that your “rule” for counting a nation/state/county is “if I’m…