Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: California

  • Corona’s Corona

    Many of my posts start off something like this: “I was looking at this map and I noticed something odd…” Right, that’s how it’s going to go today too. In this instance I was geo-tagging a pile of old photographs I’d scanned and loaded into iPhoto. Then I stumbled upon a perfect little circle of…

  • Aurora: A County Seat in Two States. Simultaneously!

    Nobody lives in Aurora today although upwards of five thousand people called it home immediately after its founding in 1860. No less a luminary than Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) called Aurora his home for several months during his mining days. It was a vibrant, successful town along the Nevada / California border. Both states claimed…

  • Lowest Public Restroom in North America

    As I noted recently, the highest and lowest elevations in the continental United States are only about 80 miles apart. What I didn’t say at the time was that I came across an interesting image as I researched that fact. A Restroom! Yes, a restroom sits here at the Badwater Basin in Death Valley. That…

  • Highest and Lowest, Oh So Close

    California contains both the highest and lowest elevations of the continental United States. Well, the “Lower 48” more precisely. Astoundingly, they are less than 88 miles (142 kilometers) apart with an elevation change approaching 15,000 feet. Mount Whitney is the California Highpoint at 14,494 feet (4,418 meters) above sea level. It crowns the mighty Sierra…

  • Maps on Google Analytics

    I enabled Google Analytics recently on my web pages. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this tool, it involves the addition of a few lines of javascript to each page which in turn reports basic information back to the great Google mothership. It allows me to gain a better understanding of web traffic…

  • Thoughts on Los Angeles and Reno

    In an earlier post, 12MC noted that we can sometime confuse east and west in our geographic perceptions. A similar condition exists with Los Angeles, California and Reno, Nevada. Los Angeles conjures up certain images. Think of beaches, surfing and movie stars living on hillsides with expansive views of the Pacific Ocean. Most of us…