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Most Remote Spots in USA Wilderness Complexes

228 points by johnny313 8y ago

convivialdingo 8y ago
I grew up in very rural NM, and while you can find a road in some of these areas, I doubt you’ll see more than a few cars a month during peak times of the year. Just because there’s a road doesn’t mean that it gets much use. Some are only used to haul animals, oil or timber a few times a year.
- Avshalom 8y ago
  Some of them were only used a few times a year. I don't know exactly how remote you can get in NM but I know plenty of our marked roads go to mines that haven't been active in a century.
sandworm101 8y ago
>>> The radius in miles shows how large a circle can be fit into each area, and how remote each point is. That distance is rather meaningless on the ground. Terrain matters. A big wall climber can be only a few hundred meters from a road on a map but still days away. On foot, 18 miles of Idaho pasture is much smaller than 3 miles of Florida swampland. I expect that there are parts of Lake Michigan that are more than 18 miles from the nearest road.
omginternets 8y ago
Just wait until you visit Western Europe.
- walshemj 8y ago
  In northern Scotland id would assume Norway and Sweden you can get a long way from roads Loch Ranoch area springs to mind
  - dboreham 8y ago
    Train there though.
- mlindner 8y ago
  Western Europe is extremely crowded with very few areas away from any amount of population.
jmpman 8y ago
The first entry (Thorofare wilderness) seems wrong. It appears that they incorrectly identified the wilderness complex boundaries as roads.
- sqlacid 8y ago
  I saw the same thing for the only Adirondack entry on the list; there's on spot that is technically private property surrounded by wilderness that probably drops the distance in half. Sure somebody could put a road there, but the effort would be insane.
toss1 8y ago
Interesting data set, but what I'd want to know is what is the farthest you can get from the farthest road. This tells us that wherever we are, IFF we walk in one of the 2-3 the optimal headings for that circle, we'll hit a road in ~18 miles max. That's the best worst-case. What about the worst worst case -- if we head in the most un-optimal direction? How effed are we in that circumstance?
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  In some place in the West you definitely can be very effed. I can imagine Alaska being even worse.
  - volkl48 8y ago
    I just watched exactly that last weekend. Not even all that remote (Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness). Guy came down with appendicitis overnight, a 10mi hike in from the nearest road/trailhead. He was fortunate enough to be able to get out to a major trail and someone with a PLB passed by and called it in, so they could get a helicopter out to him. But had he been on a slightly less popular trail, he might not have had that luck, and it could easily have been 10 hours for someone to come across him and then speed hike out to a cell signal.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      I just bought a satellite messenger for the case something goes very wrong. Hope I'll never use it.
- samstave 8y ago
  Assume you are between any two civilization services and you simply walk parallel to both indefinitely... Seems that's about as bad as it can get. So I guess finding for the longest straight line anyone can take wuthout hitting anything that could rescue you is the answer to your question.
- s0rce 8y ago
  Might not be the worst case and I may have missed a small logging road but if you were to head roughly south parallel to the John Muir Trail from around Tuolumne meadows it would be about 130-140 miles before you reach a road or US-395 around the Kennedy Meadows store. I think you can just miss the roads around Mammoth and Devil's postpile and then the Road's end trail head in SEKI.
walshemj 8y ago
This is in specific national parks though and includes all motorized vehicles not maintained roads.
sctb 8y ago
We've updated the title from “In the contiguous US, you can never be more than 18.76 miles from a road”, which breaks the submission guideline that asks for the original.
- alaskan_pedant 8y ago
  ...though the original headline is itself incorrect. The analysis excludes Alaska. "Most Remote Spots in USA Wilderness Complexes" should read "Most Remote spots in the Wilderness Complexes of the US Lower 48" From the article's fine print: > Alaska is excluded from this analysis, since the scale and character of wilderness there is simply very different than in the “Lower 48”. If Alaska wilderness areas were part of this project, the most remote spot would be in the middle of the Mollie Beattie Wilderness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the eastern Brooks Range, with an inscribed circle radius of 42.75 miles. Ironically, however, rules for wilderness in Alaska are different, and airplane landings are permitted in most areas. So in some ways you are more remote in the Thorfare area of Wyoming.
mc32 8y ago
The important thing to know is what the heading should be to that road, when you’re lost. Knowing one is no more than 17miles from you max, when under weather stress, does little good and offers little comfort.
- mjevans 8y ago
  If you're REALLY lost look for powerlines, microwave towers, rivers, or easy to build in low-lying areas. If river, follow down stream. Anything else, vaguely, follow the power / sight lines towards obvious markers or a way of calling for help. 'way of calling for help' might involve tripping security sensors.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Or cutting down a power pole. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/stranded-man-cuts-power-poles-to-draw-attention-1.890115 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/stranded-man-cut...
    - dfee 8y ago
      You know what... good for him.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - tonyarkles 8y ago
        I think it's worth pointing out how remote Wollaston Lake really is: https://goo.gl/maps/U4TxWcUjQrC2 https://goo.gl/maps/U4TxWcUjQrC2 There's a single highway that connects it to the rest of the country, and it's 550km to the nearest major city. That highway doesn't actually run to the town though; in the winter there's an ice road, and in the summer there's a ferry from the west side of the lake. If you're stranded in the bush near there, you're pretty much hoping that you can signal an aircraft that can land on the lake and pick you up. My guess is that the SaskPower repair/rescue crew probably came in via helicopter. I'm going to spend a few minutes here looking at the satellite view to try to find the power line (I can almost guarantee that it's a single one that links Wollaston Lake and Hatchet lake) Edit: didn't find the power line, but did find confirmation that the repair was helicopter: > "We have to charter a helicopter to fly the line to find out what the issue is and that's what we did on Friday. We discovered the four poles that were toppled and discovered him as well." > The man had been out on the lake in a boat when bad weather struck. His rather dire circumstances may save him from the financial consequences of his unorthodox rescue signal -- which could cost the utility upwards of $100,000 to repair. From: https://www.ctvnews.ca/stranded-man-chops-down-power-poles-to-get-rescued-1.517876 https://www.ctvnews.ca/stranded-man-chops-down-power-poles-t...
kingbirdy 8y ago
I actually find this rather upsetting. I'd always assumed if you went to the right places out west, you'd be able to get at least 50 miles or so from anything if you wanted to. It seems the west isn't quite as wild as I wanted it to be.
- zippzom 8y ago
  Some of these roads are likely extremely remote logging or dirt roads though. Some of them might not see a car for weeks at a time I would imagine.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    Yeah, some of these roads are "semi-cleared suggestions for directions of travel", not really "roads".
  - spott 8y ago
    I expect some of these roads haven't seen anyone (person or car) for years. "Roads" don't really seem to die. Once they are mapped, they show up forevermore -- even if no-one is taking them and no-one is checking that they are still navigable.
    - scruple 8y ago
      > even in ... no-one is checking that they are still navigable. Which can be a startling and frustrating experience in a bad, or even a good, situation...
    - s0rce 8y ago
      The forest service, at least in some of the more "popular" areas in WA, CA and OR sometimes rates the road on their motor vehicle use map so you know the likelihood you'll actually be able to use it. On BLM land I've found map roads that there is little no evidence of at all.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  50 miles is a long distance. Even in Death Valley there will likely be some road in some direction. And Death Valley is a f...ing big place.
5555624 8y ago
The actual title of the article does not mention roads, probably because they "all motorized travel, including the legal use of motorboats on portions of Yellowstone Lake." >So the remote Thorofare location and radius shown here will not match values calculated purely from the road network.
patcheudor 8y ago
To be more complete "from roads, machines, and motors." I live in Idaho and know for a fact you can get further than 18.76 miles from a road. The addition of "machines and motors" brings motorized trails into scope and yeah, at that point I believe it.
- justinator 8y ago
  Lots of Wilderness in Idaho have airstrips though, I believe?
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  I've been contemplating moving to Idaho. It is a beautiful place. I would like to find a part of Idaho that has low crime, has at least 30mb internet and ideally low maintenance land.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
UncleEntity 8y ago
Just by looking at the first example you can actually "be more than 18.76 miles from a road" if you don't limit your radius by park boundaries. Probably 20-somthingish just eyeballing the first map without looking at other examples where (maybe) multiple parks share borders.
- bribroder 8y ago
  Yeah it really looks like their algorithm is not doing something so fancy as considering the forest roads which in theory are motorable (but may not have seen one in years), so much as measuring from drivable roads and park boundaries which are quite jagged, with significant amounts of park outside the drawn circle... I wonder how much larger the circles would be if you allowed for roughly 1 radian of the circumference to cross outside park boundaries
- ghaff 8y ago
  There's also the assumption that Wilderness Areas are automatically the furthest from roads, machines, and motors. That may be true but I don't automatically take that as automatically true given the size of some of the National Forests out west. It's probably true given the different rules governing Wilderness Areas vs. non-wilderness areas of forests. But I wouldn't make a big bet.
  - bribroder 8y ago
    Their definition of wilderness area is quite broad and includes areas within national forests that are "de-facto" wildernesses: > Four categories of Wilderness area were considered for this analysis: > - Federal Wilderness Areas, designated by the 1964 Wilderness Act and subsequent congressional action. These are by far the best known and most numerous of the wilderness areas in the USA—there are about 750 of them, preserving federal land managed by the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. > - “De-facto” Wilderness Areas in National Parks: In most large National Parks (e.g. Olympic, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain), the bulk of the park’s backcountry has been officially designated as wilderness area. However, three large parks—Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Glacier—have large undeveloped tracts that are managed by park staff as wilderness despite lack of official designation. For this analysis, the large primitive areas of these parks have been included, since park regulations in these areas are essentially the same as in officially-designated areas. > - State Wilderness Areas: In New York state (Adirondacks and Catskills) and Maine (Baxter State Park on Katahdin), large wilderness areas are managed by the State government. Large parts of these parks have been designated as official state wilderness areas and are managed in a similar fashion to federal wilderness. > - Tribal Wilderness: Finally, a handful of large Indian Reservations have designated large areas as Tribal wilderness. Perhaps the two most notable are adjacent to federal wilderness in the Wind River Range of Wyoming and the Mission Mountains of Montana. These are included in the overall wilderness areas.
bagrow 8y ago
Very dissatisifed with the evidence in this article (only national parks?), so I did my own digging. Here is a 2005 USGS map [1] color-coding nearest road distance for every 30m x 30m square [2] in the lower 48. Surprisingly, it seems to hold up the article's claim reasonably well, and without resorting to discussing 'machines' or 'motors'. [1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2005/3011/report.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2005/3011/report.pdf [2] Edit: the map shows 1 km x 1 km averages of the higher-resolution 30 m x 30 m bins.
- ghaff 8y ago
  This article (among others) suggests that the most remote from a road is a corner of Yellowstone where you can get about 20 miles away. [1] I sort of expected that the distance would be greater even accounting for the fact that many "roads" in the West aren't really what a lot of people would consider roads. I have also read some claims for a greater distance from a road, such as in the Wind Rivers, but I haven't seen anyone arguing for more than 30 miles or so. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/25/yellowstone-national-park-wyoming-bears-wolves-remote https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/25/yellowst... [ADDED: The USGS map is really interesting although I wish they had given the "winner." It appears that there are a fair number of spots that cluster around about the 20 mile point. Some are in places you wouldn't necessarily expect although many of those are along a border which reduces the number of directions where a road could lie.]
- craftyguy 8y ago
  >only national parks? Having just come out of spending over a week in the Pasayten wilderness, it's most definitely not a national park..
  - Fripplebubby 8y ago
    Right, just to clarify, a "wilderness area" is similar to a national park in that it is land that is set aside by governmental decree, but most things are banned in a wilderness area, notably motor vehicles, whereas many national parks have all sorts of development.
- 8y ago
sarah180 8y ago
18.7 miles is a long distance. If you're 18.7 miles from the closest motorized access point, you're in the middle of 1098 square miles of untouched land. Based on my memories of exploring the woods as a child, you could spend a full year getting to know the details of even a single square mile of natural landscape. I think it's an interesting irony here that, primarily because of motor travel, we imagine that an 18.7-mile radius is not that substantial. (Yes, a marathon is more distance than that, but those are usually on paved roads and not through wilderness. The legend is that the first to run a marathon died of exhaustion on its completion.)
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  A square mile is referred to as a "section" in the parlance of the public land surveying system. That is also 640 acres. (260 hectares for those of you without acres) I looked at buying 1,000 acres of wooded land in southern Colorado (at the time it was selling for $240/acre or just under .25M$ during the dot com days) It was part of a 60,000 acre sheep ranch that was being broken up. I could easily spending years exploring a parcel that size.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > The legend is that the first to run a marathon died of exhaustion on its completion. He died because of exhaustion from running 150 miles in the preceding days, then running to Marathon.
- leoh 8y ago
  !8.7 is not a long distance if you are in good shape. I regularly do 12-18 mile hikes during the weekend, sometimes with significant elevation gain.
  - starpilot 8y ago
    About 5x slower if it's off trail, cross country terrain. Brush can be impenetrable.
    - s0rce 8y ago
thaumaturgy 8y ago
I've been in at least a couple of the places in that list, and probably about as far from civilization as possible in those areas. I'm willing to believe their numbers are technically correct. But I bet cityfolk have a reeeeeeaally different notion of "road" than is meant here. Take the Trinity Alps complex for example. It's got, still to this day, my least favorite approach ever. You go way up the north coast, then along 299 (if I remember right), then through a reservation, and then you get on this lovely little road that's several miles of 15-mile-an-hour white-knuckle less-than-single-lane rough gravel, with steep granite on one side and a drop straight down to a river on t'other, and a whole lot of blind corners. You do that for a while, then you see the yellow sign posted that says, "Road Narrows", and whaddaya know, it sure as heck does. It's a road that started as a trail and never really had any ambitions beyond that. There are a ton of logging roads and fire cuts all over the place too. Lots of dusty hill climbs. Other rarely-trafficked routes where the macho advertising for your 4WD meets a grim reality. Maps aren't necessarily current, either. I once bailed off the Wonderland Trail in Rainier after a partner took a bad fall. According to the map and the GPS, there was a road just a few miles out that led to a paved road that led to civilization. Great. Well, we get there, and after swimming through dense, wet vegetation for a while, start finally seeing signs that, yeah, there was a road there, about a hundred years ago. 18 miles as the bird flies can easily turn into two days' hiking in some of that terrain, too.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  Consider a motorcycle.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  I enjoy your prose. :)
- sulam 8y ago
  FWIW Trinity Alps has some pavement-grade approaches as well, for instance you can get onto the PCT right off a fairly major road (Sawyers Bar, which is not bad for the area -- although to be fair you've described 299 as a bad drive, which I didn't find it to be, although it's two lane undivided highway for most of it and maybe city-folk aren't used to that). However forest roads are a given for most trailheads as you've described, at least in all the California wildernesses I've spent time in. I haven't taken the road you're describing, although it sounds a lot like a forest service road I ended up on to see the eclipse north-west of Bend, OR. That was fun. Also you should probably never take 101 up to Trinity Alps: take 5 up to Redding and then cut west on 299 instead of going up the coast and cutting east. I enjoyed spotting all the places I've been in this fun guide, and the other thing I want to impress on people is that these "distance from road" measurements are crow-flies distance from the closest "road". You've done a good job describing how bad the road might be. People who have no experience with this kind of wilderness will have even less appreciation for how much work might be involved in actually getting to that the center point. It will _never_ be a 12 mile hike or whatever the distance they measure is. In many cases it's twice that, in some cases it's worse, and the trails (if there is one) are in some fairly steep terrain, so you can expect to do 15 miles on a strong day in good conditions. I went looking for my favorite wilderness and was surprised not to find it, because I know how remote it is and Trinity Alps feels significantly smaller in comparison. In looking at it, I realized they've combined the contiguous region north of Yosemite Park as the "North Yosemite Complex", which includes Emigrant (my favorite), the northern part of Yosemite, etc. I was there for four days a week ago and after I got off the main trail I saw one person while I was hiking out. The rest of the time was spent off the trail and with no sign of another soul.
pathseeker 8y ago
>where nature reigns supreme and no powered travel is permitted. Except for airplanes and helicopters of course. There are no airspace restrictions preventing you from flying over these locations and I know people who have landed both planes and helicopters in these regions (although likely illegally).
- s0rce 8y ago
  You can fly over but you can't land. I'm not sure what the rule is about jumping out of the helicopter hovering a few feet above. Clearly against the spirit of the designated wilderness. Planes are in fact really common sight over many of the Sierra Nevada wilderness as east coast to west coast transcontinental flight paths go right over the area, its a constant reminder you aren't really that far away. Some of the wilderness along the CA coast feel quite remote as you see almost no planes passing over you.
lukasb 8y ago
It looks like they limit the radius of wilderness to the US border. The circle for Boundary Waters would be bigger otherwise, since the Quetico (on Canada's side) is wilderness as well.
- mrgoldenbrown 8y ago
  From the article: "Wilderness areas in Canada are not taken into account. There is no Canadian national wilderness designation program like there in the USA, and determining the boundaries of land with wilderness character in the various parks would be difficult. Three US wilderness complexes have inscribed circles constrained by the border with Canada, and a glance at aerial maps for the areas north of the Mount Baker and Pasyaten wilderness areas show what looks like roads and clear-cuts over the border. However, the Boundary Waters wilderness is next to the vast Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, which appears to be mostly primeval. So the radius for Boundary Waters could be as high as 13.6 miles if allowed to go over the border."
  - lukasb 8y ago
    Ahhhh thanks for RTFA for me
dima55 8y ago
It looks like you get 18.7 miles for the Thorofare area if you look at the boundaries of the wilderness area, not roads. For OSM data, specifically, the area is bigger than that: 21.7 miles. If yall want to play yourselves: http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2017/09/25_pole-of-road-inaccessibility-of-the-contiguous-us.html http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2017/09/25_pole-of-road-i... and for more fun: http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/05/06_poles-of-inaccessibility-in-the-san-gabriel-mountains.html http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/05/06_poles-of-inacc...
grecy 8y ago
One of the most shocking facts about the lower 48 is that it's impossible to get more than 115 miles from a McDonalds. That's not on a road - that's anywhere in the lower 48. I always assume nearby a McDonald's would likely be a gas station. Growing up in Australia and now living in the Yukon this blows my mind. I just drove 35,000 miles from Morocco to Cape Town in South Africa, and there were zero McDonalds that entire time. [1] The Lower 48 is extremely densely developed! [0] http://www.datapointed.net/2009/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdonalds/ http://www.datapointed.net/2009/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdon... and http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdonalds-sept-2010/ http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdon... [1] http://theroadchoseme.com/africa-expedition-overview http://theroadchoseme.com/africa-expedition-overview
- chrissnell 8y ago
  I've done a lot of expedition-style driving (can't stand the words "expedition" and "overlanding" as they are used today) and that straight line distance is very deceiving. I've been to many places that are many more that 115 road-miles from a McDonald's. A few places come to mind: deep in the southern part of the Owyhee Desert along the NV/ID border (one of the least-populated places in the Lower 48), and out in the Wah Wah Mountains [0] of southern Utah. There are some photos of these places on my IG: https://instagram.com/desertdefender https://instagram.com/desertdefender [0] https://instagram.com/p/BjRFEeZDxBI/ https://instagram.com/p/BjRFEeZDxBI/
  - grecy 8y ago
    Oh sure, it's 115 straight line miles, but in my opinion that is still extremely close and populated. In many other countries it's nothing to get 1000 straight-line miles from a McDonalds, or gas station, or other "development"
    - vonzeppelin 8y ago
      Most countries don't even have have a width of 1000 miles so I find this claim questionable.
  - 8y ago
Alex3917 8y ago
What are the largest contiguous privately owned parcels in the U.S.? And what is a good way to find private landowners using GIS in general?
- theparanoid 8y ago
  I suspect Sierra Pacific [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Pacific_Industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Pacific_Industries
- s0rce 8y ago
  Maybe the King Ranch in Texas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ranch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ranch
  - whatusername 8y ago
    For an indicator of scale -- the King Ranch is four separate plots that aren't contiguous covering 825,000 acres. Anna Creek Station covers 5,850,000 acres. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  http://fortune.com/2012/09/27/meet-the-largest-landowner-in-america/ http://fortune.com/2012/09/27/meet-the-largest-landowner-in-...
- jhj 8y ago
  Weyerhaeuser owns something in the neighborhood of 12 million acres of timberland in the US, though I don't know what their largest contiguous parcel is. They are probably the largest private landowner in the US (corporate, not individual).
kyleblarson 8y ago
I live in Mazama, Washington right on the edge of the Pasayten Wilderness (we can run from the house and be in the wilderness in a few trail miles). It is a massive, remote, beautiful place that even most people in Seattle have never heard of. There are downsides to living so remotely but the upsides far outweigh them.
- cheeze 8y ago
  Seattle all my life and I've never heard of Mazama or Pasayten Wilderness -.-
  - kyleblarson 8y ago
    It's only 3.5 hours from Seattle in the summer when Washington Pass is open and about 5 hours in the winter. Beautiful and worth a weekend visit.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    Google "north Cascades highway"
  - s0rce 8y ago
    From living in Eastern WA it seemed liked most of the Western WA people never crossed the mountains or knew that there even was another side. Don't tell anyone as we don't want too many to learn about it.
diebir 8y ago
Equaling remoteness with being a designated wilderness is not the best way to find the most remote spots. Get on Tarantula Mesa or Upper Stevens Canyon in Utah. It is not a wilderness, but a National Monument (the one shrunk by the orange piece of shit in white house, btw), but these places are exceptionally remote. Certainly more remote than Thorofare in Yellowstone.
dboreham 8y ago
I live close to the top few locations in the list, although I've not yet had sufficient spare time to actually hike 20 miles off-road. But another interesting thing about this area is how far it is from a "proper city". e.g. 8h drive to Salt Lake or Calgary. 11h to Denver and Seattle. I'm not aware of any place in the lower 48 that's so far from metropolitian living. e.g. the next place down the list : Sierra Nevada. If you lived in a town nearby, say Mariposa : you're only 4h from San Francisco (assuming 580 is only moderately stationary).
marune 8y ago
The one in ME is wrong, there are roads in BSP.
- abkfenris 8y ago
  It’s correct, the wilderness boundary line for Baxter follows the road. They didn’t just use the park extent.
  - 24gttghh 8y ago
    Nope, the [park tote] road at 46.011344, -69.061875 is within the "remote radius" at peakbagger by about 450-500m. It's still in the top-50, but it's a tad lower on the list.
walrus01 8y ago
Fun trivia: at the highest vehicle accessible road in WA state (Slate Peak radar site), I have seen people get all the way to the top in a 1995 Toyota Corolla. The road to get there is not so terrible. There are many truly gnarly logging roads and things that will require a serious lifted 4x4 in first gear with AT tires. But all those are at lower elevation. https://www.google.com/search?q=slate+peak+wa&oq=slate+peak+wa&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l3.2316j0j7&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=slate+peak+wa&oq=slate+peak+...
bytematic 8y ago
To bad there is nothing in Wisconsin, one of the more beautiful states.
sixstringtheory 8y ago
Yvon Chouinard mentions this in his excellent book “Let My People Go Surfing,” where he says the furthest you can get from a road in the lower 48 is about 20 miles, near the headwaters of the Snake River in Wyoming. Cool to see some methodology that lines up with that estimate.
agf 8y ago
This is awesome! I've been near a few of these spots. However, some, at least, of their data is out of date. For the Adirondack High Peaks complex, much of the Tahawus Tract, which bounds the circle on the southeast side, has been officially part of the wilderness area for five or so years now. I used to work at the main visitor's center in the area, and now work remote from about two miles from the northern edge of the complex. I'd say that adds roughly a mile to the radius here, but it could be a little less. Also, in the near future, the bounds of the complex will change drastically at the southeast edge. The Boreas Ponds tract has been acquired by the state, and while it hasn't yet been officially designated as wilderness, when it is, it will connect the High Peaks to the Dix Mountain Wilderness, making the overall complex -- already the largest in the northeast -- something like 20% larger. But it won't stop it being a crazy shape.
teawithcarl 8y ago
Panhandle Lake is NOT the most remote place in the Boundary Waters. Not by any stretch. A clay foot algorithm. I’ve had 100 square miles alone to myself in the BWCA for days/weeks and know the park well. Since the BWCA is adjacent to the Quetico (on the Canadian side of the border), the concept of remote skews much further north. Time of year is also “remote” ... late October/early November is beautiful, if you don’t get “iced-in” for winter and can neither canoe nor walk out. A relatively remote lake is Lake Kiana, where I’ve been between two simultaneous wolf packs (100 yds and 150 yards away in opposite directions). BWCA is where Yellowstone re-populated its wolves from. That close to 20-25 wolves chasing deer in the deep of night ... you listen for the “yip, yip, yip” of the pups trying to learn and keep up.
jordache 8y ago
The West is the Best!

228 points by johnny313 8y ago

I grew up in very rural NM, and while you can find a road in some of these areas, I doubt you’ll see more than a few cars a month during peak times of the year. Just because there’s a road doesn’t mean that it gets much use. Some are only used to haul animals, oil or timber a few times a year.

Avshalom 8y ago
Some of them were only used a few times a year. I don't know exactly how remote you can get in NM but I know plenty of our marked roads go to mines that haven't been active in a century.

sandworm101 8y ago

>>> The radius in miles shows how large a circle can be fit into each area, and how remote each point is. That distance is rather meaningless on the ground. Terrain matters. A big wall climber can be only a few hundred meters from a road on a map but still days away. On foot, 18 miles of Idaho pasture is much smaller than 3 miles of Florida swampland. I expect that there are parts of Lake Michigan that are more than 18 miles from the nearest road.

omginternets 8y ago

Just wait until you visit Western Europe.

walshemj 8y ago
In northern Scotland id would assume Norway and Sweden you can get a long way from roads Loch Ranoch area springs to mind
- dboreham 8y ago
  Train there though.
mlindner 8y ago
Western Europe is extremely crowded with very few areas away from any amount of population.

jmpman 8y ago

The first entry (Thorofare wilderness) seems wrong. It appears that they incorrectly identified the wilderness complex boundaries as roads.

sqlacid 8y ago
I saw the same thing for the only Adirondack entry on the list; there's on spot that is technically private property surrounded by wilderness that probably drops the distance in half. Sure somebody could put a road there, but the effort would be insane.

toss1 8y ago

Interesting data set, but what I'd want to know is what is the farthest you can get from the farthest road. This tells us that wherever we are, IFF we walk in one of the 2-3 the optimal headings for that circle, we'll hit a road in ~18 miles max. That's the best worst-case. What about the worst worst case -- if we head in the most un-optimal direction? How effed are we in that circumstance?

maxxxxx 8y ago
In some place in the West you definitely can be very effed. I can imagine Alaska being even worse.
- volkl48 8y ago
  I just watched exactly that last weekend. Not even all that remote (Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness). Guy came down with appendicitis overnight, a 10mi hike in from the nearest road/trailhead. He was fortunate enough to be able to get out to a major trail and someone with a PLB passed by and called it in, so they could get a helicopter out to him. But had he been on a slightly less popular trail, he might not have had that luck, and it could easily have been 10 hours for someone to come across him and then speed hike out to a cell signal.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I just bought a satellite messenger for the case something goes very wrong. Hope I'll never use it.
samstave 8y ago
Assume you are between any two civilization services and you simply walk parallel to both indefinitely... Seems that's about as bad as it can get. So I guess finding for the longest straight line anyone can take wuthout hitting anything that could rescue you is the answer to your question.
s0rce 8y ago
Might not be the worst case and I may have missed a small logging road but if you were to head roughly south parallel to the John Muir Trail from around Tuolumne meadows it would be about 130-140 miles before you reach a road or US-395 around the Kennedy Meadows store. I think you can just miss the roads around Mammoth and Devil's postpile and then the Road's end trail head in SEKI.

walshemj 8y ago

This is in specific national parks though and includes all motorized vehicles not maintained roads.

sctb 8y ago

We've updated the title from “In the contiguous US, you can never be more than 18.76 miles from a road”, which breaks the submission guideline that asks for the original.

alaskan_pedant 8y ago
...though the original headline is itself incorrect. The analysis excludes Alaska. "Most Remote Spots in USA Wilderness Complexes" should read "Most Remote spots in the Wilderness Complexes of the US Lower 48" From the article's fine print: > Alaska is excluded from this analysis, since the scale and character of wilderness there is simply very different than in the “Lower 48”. If Alaska wilderness areas were part of this project, the most remote spot would be in the middle of the Mollie Beattie Wilderness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the eastern Brooks Range, with an inscribed circle radius of 42.75 miles. Ironically, however, rules for wilderness in Alaska are different, and airplane landings are permitted in most areas. So in some ways you are more remote in the Thorfare area of Wyoming.

mc32 8y ago

The important thing to know is what the heading should be to that road, when you’re lost. Knowing one is no more than 17miles from you max, when under weather stress, does little good and offers little comfort.

mjevans 8y ago
If you're REALLY lost look for powerlines, microwave towers, rivers, or easy to build in low-lying areas. If river, follow down stream. Anything else, vaguely, follow the power / sight lines towards obvious markers or a way of calling for help. 'way of calling for help' might involve tripping security sensors.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Or cutting down a power pole. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/stranded-man-cuts-power-poles-to-draw-attention-1.890115 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/stranded-man-cut...
  - dfee 8y ago
    You know what... good for him.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - tonyarkles 8y ago
      I think it's worth pointing out how remote Wollaston Lake really is: https://goo.gl/maps/U4TxWcUjQrC2 https://goo.gl/maps/U4TxWcUjQrC2 There's a single highway that connects it to the rest of the country, and it's 550km to the nearest major city. That highway doesn't actually run to the town though; in the winter there's an ice road, and in the summer there's a ferry from the west side of the lake. If you're stranded in the bush near there, you're pretty much hoping that you can signal an aircraft that can land on the lake and pick you up. My guess is that the SaskPower repair/rescue crew probably came in via helicopter. I'm going to spend a few minutes here looking at the satellite view to try to find the power line (I can almost guarantee that it's a single one that links Wollaston Lake and Hatchet lake) Edit: didn't find the power line, but did find confirmation that the repair was helicopter: > "We have to charter a helicopter to fly the line to find out what the issue is and that's what we did on Friday. We discovered the four poles that were toppled and discovered him as well." > The man had been out on the lake in a boat when bad weather struck. His rather dire circumstances may save him from the financial consequences of his unorthodox rescue signal -- which could cost the utility upwards of $100,000 to repair. From: https://www.ctvnews.ca/stranded-man-chops-down-power-poles-to-get-rescued-1.517876 https://www.ctvnews.ca/stranded-man-chops-down-power-poles-t...

kingbirdy 8y ago

I actually find this rather upsetting. I'd always assumed if you went to the right places out west, you'd be able to get at least 50 miles or so from anything if you wanted to. It seems the west isn't quite as wild as I wanted it to be.

zippzom 8y ago
Some of these roads are likely extremely remote logging or dirt roads though. Some of them might not see a car for weeks at a time I would imagine.
- Fomite 8y ago
  Yeah, some of these roads are "semi-cleared suggestions for directions of travel", not really "roads".
- spott 8y ago
  I expect some of these roads haven't seen anyone (person or car) for years. "Roads" don't really seem to die. Once they are mapped, they show up forevermore -- even if no-one is taking them and no-one is checking that they are still navigable.
  - scruple 8y ago
    > even in ... no-one is checking that they are still navigable. Which can be a startling and frustrating experience in a bad, or even a good, situation...
  - s0rce 8y ago
    The forest service, at least in some of the more "popular" areas in WA, CA and OR sometimes rates the road on their motor vehicle use map so you know the likelihood you'll actually be able to use it. On BLM land I've found map roads that there is little no evidence of at all.
maxxxxx 8y ago
50 miles is a long distance. Even in Death Valley there will likely be some road in some direction. And Death Valley is a f...ing big place.

5555624 8y ago

The actual title of the article does not mention roads, probably because they "all motorized travel, including the legal use of motorboats on portions of Yellowstone Lake." >So the remote Thorofare location and radius shown here will not match values calculated purely from the road network.

patcheudor 8y ago

To be more complete "from roads, machines, and motors." I live in Idaho and know for a fact you can get further than 18.76 miles from a road. The addition of "machines and motors" brings motorized trails into scope and yeah, at that point I believe it.

justinator 8y ago
Lots of Wilderness in Idaho have airstrips though, I believe?
LinuxBender 8y ago
I've been contemplating moving to Idaho. It is a beautiful place. I would like to find a part of Idaho that has low crime, has at least 30mb internet and ideally low maintenance land.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

UncleEntity 8y ago

Just by looking at the first example you can actually "be more than 18.76 miles from a road" if you don't limit your radius by park boundaries. Probably 20-somthingish just eyeballing the first map without looking at other examples where (maybe) multiple parks share borders.

bribroder 8y ago
Yeah it really looks like their algorithm is not doing something so fancy as considering the forest roads which in theory are motorable (but may not have seen one in years), so much as measuring from drivable roads and park boundaries which are quite jagged, with significant amounts of park outside the drawn circle... I wonder how much larger the circles would be if you allowed for roughly 1 radian of the circumference to cross outside park boundaries
ghaff 8y ago
There's also the assumption that Wilderness Areas are automatically the furthest from roads, machines, and motors. That may be true but I don't automatically take that as automatically true given the size of some of the National Forests out west. It's probably true given the different rules governing Wilderness Areas vs. non-wilderness areas of forests. But I wouldn't make a big bet.
- bribroder 8y ago
  Their definition of wilderness area is quite broad and includes areas within national forests that are "de-facto" wildernesses: > Four categories of Wilderness area were considered for this analysis: > - Federal Wilderness Areas, designated by the 1964 Wilderness Act and subsequent congressional action. These are by far the best known and most numerous of the wilderness areas in the USA—there are about 750 of them, preserving federal land managed by the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. > - “De-facto” Wilderness Areas in National Parks: In most large National Parks (e.g. Olympic, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain), the bulk of the park’s backcountry has been officially designated as wilderness area. However, three large parks—Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Glacier—have large undeveloped tracts that are managed by park staff as wilderness despite lack of official designation. For this analysis, the large primitive areas of these parks have been included, since park regulations in these areas are essentially the same as in officially-designated areas. > - State Wilderness Areas: In New York state (Adirondacks and Catskills) and Maine (Baxter State Park on Katahdin), large wilderness areas are managed by the State government. Large parts of these parks have been designated as official state wilderness areas and are managed in a similar fashion to federal wilderness. > - Tribal Wilderness: Finally, a handful of large Indian Reservations have designated large areas as Tribal wilderness. Perhaps the two most notable are adjacent to federal wilderness in the Wind River Range of Wyoming and the Mission Mountains of Montana. These are included in the overall wilderness areas.

bagrow 8y ago

Very dissatisifed with the evidence in this article (only national parks?), so I did my own digging. Here is a 2005 USGS map [1] color-coding nearest road distance for every 30m x 30m square [2] in the lower 48. Surprisingly, it seems to hold up the article's claim reasonably well, and without resorting to discussing 'machines' or 'motors'. [1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2005/3011/report.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2005/3011/report.pdf [2] Edit: the map shows 1 km x 1 km averages of the higher-resolution 30 m x 30 m bins.

ghaff 8y ago
This article (among others) suggests that the most remote from a road is a corner of Yellowstone where you can get about 20 miles away. [1] I sort of expected that the distance would be greater even accounting for the fact that many "roads" in the West aren't really what a lot of people would consider roads. I have also read some claims for a greater distance from a road, such as in the Wind Rivers, but I haven't seen anyone arguing for more than 30 miles or so. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/25/yellowstone-national-park-wyoming-bears-wolves-remote https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/25/yellowst... [ADDED: The USGS map is really interesting although I wish they had given the "winner." It appears that there are a fair number of spots that cluster around about the 20 mile point. Some are in places you wouldn't necessarily expect although many of those are along a border which reduces the number of directions where a road could lie.]
craftyguy 8y ago
>only national parks? Having just come out of spending over a week in the Pasayten wilderness, it's most definitely not a national park..
- Fripplebubby 8y ago
  Right, just to clarify, a "wilderness area" is similar to a national park in that it is land that is set aside by governmental decree, but most things are banned in a wilderness area, notably motor vehicles, whereas many national parks have all sorts of development.
8y ago

sarah180 8y ago

18.7 miles is a long distance. If you're 18.7 miles from the closest motorized access point, you're in the middle of 1098 square miles of untouched land. Based on my memories of exploring the woods as a child, you could spend a full year getting to know the details of even a single square mile of natural landscape. I think it's an interesting irony here that, primarily because of motor travel, we imagine that an 18.7-mile radius is not that substantial. (Yes, a marathon is more distance than that, but those are usually on paved roads and not through wilderness. The legend is that the first to run a marathon died of exhaustion on its completion.)

ChuckMcM 8y ago
A square mile is referred to as a "section" in the parlance of the public land surveying system. That is also 640 acres. (260 hectares for those of you without acres) I looked at buying 1,000 acres of wooded land in southern Colorado (at the time it was selling for $240/acre or just under .25M$ during the dot com days) It was part of a 60,000 acre sheep ranch that was being broken up. I could easily spending years exploring a parcel that size.
saagarjha 8y ago
> The legend is that the first to run a marathon died of exhaustion on its completion. He died because of exhaustion from running 150 miles in the preceding days, then running to Marathon.
leoh 8y ago
!8.7 is not a long distance if you are in good shape. I regularly do 12-18 mile hikes during the weekend, sometimes with significant elevation gain.
- starpilot 8y ago
  About 5x slower if it's off trail, cross country terrain. Brush can be impenetrable.
  - s0rce 8y ago

thaumaturgy 8y ago

I've been in at least a couple of the places in that list, and probably about as far from civilization as possible in those areas. I'm willing to believe their numbers are technically correct. But I bet cityfolk have a reeeeeeaally different notion of "road" than is meant here. Take the Trinity Alps complex for example. It's got, still to this day, my least favorite approach ever. You go way up the north coast, then along 299 (if I remember right), then through a reservation, and then you get on this lovely little road that's several miles of 15-mile-an-hour white-knuckle less-than-single-lane rough gravel, with steep granite on one side and a drop straight down to a river on t'other, and a whole lot of blind corners. You do that for a while, then you see the yellow sign posted that says, "Road Narrows", and whaddaya know, it sure as heck does. It's a road that started as a trail and never really had any ambitions beyond that. There are a ton of logging roads and fire cuts all over the place too. Lots of dusty hill climbs. Other rarely-trafficked routes where the macho advertising for your 4WD meets a grim reality. Maps aren't necessarily current, either. I once bailed off the Wonderland Trail in Rainier after a partner took a bad fall. According to the map and the GPS, there was a road just a few miles out that led to a paved road that led to civilization. Great. Well, we get there, and after swimming through dense, wet vegetation for a while, start finally seeing signs that, yeah, there was a road there, about a hundred years ago. 18 miles as the bird flies can easily turn into two days' hiking in some of that terrain, too.

ebikelaw 8y ago
Consider a motorcycle.
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
I enjoy your prose. :)
sulam 8y ago
FWIW Trinity Alps has some pavement-grade approaches as well, for instance you can get onto the PCT right off a fairly major road (Sawyers Bar, which is not bad for the area -- although to be fair you've described 299 as a bad drive, which I didn't find it to be, although it's two lane undivided highway for most of it and maybe city-folk aren't used to that). However forest roads are a given for most trailheads as you've described, at least in all the California wildernesses I've spent time in. I haven't taken the road you're describing, although it sounds a lot like a forest service road I ended up on to see the eclipse north-west of Bend, OR. That was fun. Also you should probably never take 101 up to Trinity Alps: take 5 up to Redding and then cut west on 299 instead of going up the coast and cutting east. I enjoyed spotting all the places I've been in this fun guide, and the other thing I want to impress on people is that these "distance from road" measurements are crow-flies distance from the closest "road". You've done a good job describing how bad the road might be. People who have no experience with this kind of wilderness will have even less appreciation for how much work might be involved in actually getting to that the center point. It will _never_ be a 12 mile hike or whatever the distance they measure is. In many cases it's twice that, in some cases it's worse, and the trails (if there is one) are in some fairly steep terrain, so you can expect to do 15 miles on a strong day in good conditions. I went looking for my favorite wilderness and was surprised not to find it, because I know how remote it is and Trinity Alps feels significantly smaller in comparison. In looking at it, I realized they've combined the contiguous region north of Yosemite Park as the "North Yosemite Complex", which includes Emigrant (my favorite), the northern part of Yosemite, etc. I was there for four days a week ago and after I got off the main trail I saw one person while I was hiking out. The rest of the time was spent off the trail and with no sign of another soul.

pathseeker 8y ago

>where nature reigns supreme and no powered travel is permitted. Except for airplanes and helicopters of course. There are no airspace restrictions preventing you from flying over these locations and I know people who have landed both planes and helicopters in these regions (although likely illegally).

s0rce 8y ago
You can fly over but you can't land. I'm not sure what the rule is about jumping out of the helicopter hovering a few feet above. Clearly against the spirit of the designated wilderness. Planes are in fact really common sight over many of the Sierra Nevada wilderness as east coast to west coast transcontinental flight paths go right over the area, its a constant reminder you aren't really that far away. Some of the wilderness along the CA coast feel quite remote as you see almost no planes passing over you.

lukasb 8y ago

It looks like they limit the radius of wilderness to the US border. The circle for Boundary Waters would be bigger otherwise, since the Quetico (on Canada's side) is wilderness as well.

mrgoldenbrown 8y ago
From the article: "Wilderness areas in Canada are not taken into account. There is no Canadian national wilderness designation program like there in the USA, and determining the boundaries of land with wilderness character in the various parks would be difficult. Three US wilderness complexes have inscribed circles constrained by the border with Canada, and a glance at aerial maps for the areas north of the Mount Baker and Pasyaten wilderness areas show what looks like roads and clear-cuts over the border. However, the Boundary Waters wilderness is next to the vast Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, which appears to be mostly primeval. So the radius for Boundary Waters could be as high as 13.6 miles if allowed to go over the border."
- lukasb 8y ago
  Ahhhh thanks for RTFA for me

dima55 8y ago

It looks like you get 18.7 miles for the Thorofare area if you look at the boundaries of the wilderness area, not roads. For OSM data, specifically, the area is bigger than that: 21.7 miles. If yall want to play yourselves: http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2017/09/25_pole-of-road-inaccessibility-of-the-contiguous-us.html http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2017/09/25_pole-of-road-i... and for more fun: http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/05/06_poles-of-inaccessibility-in-the-san-gabriel-mountains.html http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/05/06_poles-of-inacc...

grecy 8y ago

One of the most shocking facts about the lower 48 is that it's impossible to get more than 115 miles from a McDonalds. That's not on a road - that's anywhere in the lower 48. I always assume nearby a McDonald's would likely be a gas station. Growing up in Australia and now living in the Yukon this blows my mind. I just drove 35,000 miles from Morocco to Cape Town in South Africa, and there were zero McDonalds that entire time. [1] The Lower 48 is extremely densely developed! [0] http://www.datapointed.net/2009/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdonalds/ http://www.datapointed.net/2009/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdon... and http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdonalds-sept-2010/ http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdon... [1] http://theroadchoseme.com/africa-expedition-overview http://theroadchoseme.com/africa-expedition-overview

chrissnell 8y ago
I've done a lot of expedition-style driving (can't stand the words "expedition" and "overlanding" as they are used today) and that straight line distance is very deceiving. I've been to many places that are many more that 115 road-miles from a McDonald's. A few places come to mind: deep in the southern part of the Owyhee Desert along the NV/ID border (one of the least-populated places in the Lower 48), and out in the Wah Wah Mountains [0] of southern Utah. There are some photos of these places on my IG: https://instagram.com/desertdefender https://instagram.com/desertdefender [0] https://instagram.com/p/BjRFEeZDxBI/ https://instagram.com/p/BjRFEeZDxBI/
- grecy 8y ago
  Oh sure, it's 115 straight line miles, but in my opinion that is still extremely close and populated. In many other countries it's nothing to get 1000 straight-line miles from a McDonalds, or gas station, or other "development"
  - vonzeppelin 8y ago
    Most countries don't even have have a width of 1000 miles so I find this claim questionable.
- 8y ago

Alex3917 8y ago

What are the largest contiguous privately owned parcels in the U.S.? And what is a good way to find private landowners using GIS in general?

theparanoid 8y ago
I suspect Sierra Pacific [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Pacific_Industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Pacific_Industries
s0rce 8y ago
Maybe the King Ranch in Texas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ranch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ranch
- whatusername 8y ago
  For an indicator of scale -- the King Ranch is four separate plots that aren't contiguous covering 825,000 acres. Anna Creek Station covers 5,850,000 acres. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station
DoreenMichele 8y ago
http://fortune.com/2012/09/27/meet-the-largest-landowner-in-america/ http://fortune.com/2012/09/27/meet-the-largest-landowner-in-...
jhj 8y ago
Weyerhaeuser owns something in the neighborhood of 12 million acres of timberland in the US, though I don't know what their largest contiguous parcel is. They are probably the largest private landowner in the US (corporate, not individual).

kyleblarson 8y ago

I live in Mazama, Washington right on the edge of the Pasayten Wilderness (we can run from the house and be in the wilderness in a few trail miles). It is a massive, remote, beautiful place that even most people in Seattle have never heard of. There are downsides to living so remotely but the upsides far outweigh them.

cheeze 8y ago
Seattle all my life and I've never heard of Mazama or Pasayten Wilderness -.-
- kyleblarson 8y ago
  It's only 3.5 hours from Seattle in the summer when Washington Pass is open and about 5 hours in the winter. Beautiful and worth a weekend visit.
- walrus01 8y ago
  Google "north Cascades highway"
- s0rce 8y ago
  From living in Eastern WA it seemed liked most of the Western WA people never crossed the mountains or knew that there even was another side. Don't tell anyone as we don't want too many to learn about it.

diebir 8y ago

Equaling remoteness with being a designated wilderness is not the best way to find the most remote spots. Get on Tarantula Mesa or Upper Stevens Canyon in Utah. It is not a wilderness, but a National Monument (the one shrunk by the orange piece of shit in white house, btw), but these places are exceptionally remote. Certainly more remote than Thorofare in Yellowstone.

dboreham 8y ago

I live close to the top few locations in the list, although I've not yet had sufficient spare time to actually hike 20 miles off-road. But another interesting thing about this area is how far it is from a "proper city". e.g. 8h drive to Salt Lake or Calgary. 11h to Denver and Seattle. I'm not aware of any place in the lower 48 that's so far from metropolitian living. e.g. the next place down the list : Sierra Nevada. If you lived in a town nearby, say Mariposa : you're only 4h from San Francisco (assuming 580 is only moderately stationary).

marune 8y ago

The one in ME is wrong, there are roads in BSP.

abkfenris 8y ago
It’s correct, the wilderness boundary line for Baxter follows the road. They didn’t just use the park extent.
- 24gttghh 8y ago
  Nope, the [park tote] road at 46.011344, -69.061875 is within the "remote radius" at peakbagger by about 450-500m. It's still in the top-50, but it's a tad lower on the list.

walrus01 8y ago

Fun trivia: at the highest vehicle accessible road in WA state (Slate Peak radar site), I have seen people get all the way to the top in a 1995 Toyota Corolla. The road to get there is not so terrible. There are many truly gnarly logging roads and things that will require a serious lifted 4x4 in first gear with AT tires. But all those are at lower elevation. https://www.google.com/search?q=slate+peak+wa&oq=slate+peak+wa&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l3.2316j0j7&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=slate+peak+wa&oq=slate+peak+...

bytematic 8y ago

To bad there is nothing in Wisconsin, one of the more beautiful states.

sixstringtheory 8y ago

Yvon Chouinard mentions this in his excellent book “Let My People Go Surfing,” where he says the furthest you can get from a road in the lower 48 is about 20 miles, near the headwaters of the Snake River in Wyoming. Cool to see some methodology that lines up with that estimate.

agf 8y ago

This is awesome! I've been near a few of these spots. However, some, at least, of their data is out of date. For the Adirondack High Peaks complex, much of the Tahawus Tract, which bounds the circle on the southeast side, has been officially part of the wilderness area for five or so years now. I used to work at the main visitor's center in the area, and now work remote from about two miles from the northern edge of the complex. I'd say that adds roughly a mile to the radius here, but it could be a little less. Also, in the near future, the bounds of the complex will change drastically at the southeast edge. The Boreas Ponds tract has been acquired by the state, and while it hasn't yet been officially designated as wilderness, when it is, it will connect the High Peaks to the Dix Mountain Wilderness, making the overall complex -- already the largest in the northeast -- something like 20% larger. But it won't stop it being a crazy shape.

teawithcarl 8y ago

Panhandle Lake is NOT the most remote place in the Boundary Waters. Not by any stretch. A clay foot algorithm. I’ve had 100 square miles alone to myself in the BWCA for days/weeks and know the park well. Since the BWCA is adjacent to the Quetico (on the Canadian side of the border), the concept of remote skews much further north. Time of year is also “remote” ... late October/early November is beautiful, if you don’t get “iced-in” for winter and can neither canoe nor walk out. A relatively remote lake is Lake Kiana, where I’ve been between two simultaneous wolf packs (100 yds and 150 yards away in opposite directions). BWCA is where Yellowstone re-populated its wolves from. That close to 20-25 wolves chasing deer in the deep of night ... you listen for the “yip, yip, yip” of the pups trying to learn and keep up.

jordache 8y ago

The West is the Best!