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Being an avid hill walker, I love to see how far away from civilization I can get in Colorado on my hikes. I should be able to get really out there, right? My S

Being an avid hill walker, I love to see how far away from civilization I can get in Colorado on my hikes. I should be able to get really out there, right? My State is 1/3 public, undeveloped land! The farthest summit from a road is about 6 miles. Kinda made me sad inside. That's how remote you can get from a car. I have gone on farther trips without crossing a paved road - one being 120 miles that took 6+ days (tough terrain!) by following the crest of an entire mountain range - quite difficult. As the crow flies, that's about 70 miles point to point. If you stretch the theoretical limit between paved roads - encapsulating this entire mountain range, it's about 78 miles. There's about 3 rough 4WD tracks that you can use to cross it - but that's it, in that entire range, any other point across you have to traverse by foot (and there's only a few trails to do so too). Hope it stays that way. But again, it's still always <6 miles to where you can drive a car. I've been to more "remote" places, such as Alaska, with vast Wilderness- but they let you fly planes into there, which seems somewhat like cheating.

bombcar 4y ago
Part of the issue is that the vast western BLM land in the USA is mostly some variation of desert; and that desert is very VERY easy to put a road down on, if all the road is a slightly graded path. I assume you've seen https://www.projectremote.com/remote-statistics/ https://www.projectremote.com/remote-statistics/ (updated from defaced/hacked domain)
- justinator 4y ago
  hmm, I think though there's a reason that the road exists - even in the desert? Probably to mine or a mine town originally? Same with all the roads in the mountains. Resource extraction and motor vehicles kinda go hand in hand.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Most of the ones I've encountered in the high desert have things like ancient mining claims or tiny towns somewhere, but others appear to simply be 4WD trails that have been used "enough". According to the link; Wyoming has the furthest at 21 miles from a road (which is a circle containing 1385 sq miles). Since distance from a road is a circle, the sq miles needed to get far from it go fast quickly, even six miles is 113 sq mile, and since it's likely a road alongside one edge, you're talking a square of land at least 144 sq mile. The only things that big are usually parks/nature reserves of some kind, and they often have fire roads or other accesses built for reasons (including people camping, etc).
    - justinator 4y ago
      I've got that point as somewhere near the middle of of Yellowstone NP. The farthest point in Rocky Mountain National Park from is 6. It takes the wind out of me.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        In some weird way it's the "no most boring number" problem; if a point is the most remote, then there's a reason to build a road to it, because it's a point of interest, but doing so kills the remoteness. Personally given how wide a range of things "dirt road" covers, I would consider paved road to be the line - some things that are dirt roads you can do 50+ mph down no problem, others are literally impassible without the best 4 wheel drive vehicles; and some not even that - they're technically on the map but the road is overgrown so much that you can barely get a motorbike down it; and once you're using a motorbike you can go almost anywhere in the world that humans can reach.
    - scythe 4y ago
      Depending on your definition of "mainland", you can get even more remote in southern Louisiana on the peninsula south of Fourleague Bay, southeast of the Atchafalaya Delta. Google Maps shows it as around 26 miles from any road. But most of the corresponding "circle" will then be in the ocean.
      - justinator 4y ago
        Ha - yeah, if the land is basically an island, there may be an exception. If we look at the map from the article, looks like they avoided major waterways as well.
        bombcar 4y ago
        One of the terms thrown around is "navigable" - which includes things like roads, airports, and waterways that can be traversed by (usually motor) boat. Obviously since helicopters can land on Mt Everest, you ignore those. https://unofficialnetworks.com/2022/12/29/helicopter-land-summit-everest/ https://unofficialnetworks.com/2022/12/29/helicopter-land-su... One of the amusing things is that it is not that hard to get away from people - you only need to be about 270 miles from the nearest human to get a situation where that nearest human is in the International Space Station flying overhead. But you have to map out airliner routes, etc, as planes will fly over otherwise empty land/ocean.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Probably to mine or a mine town originally? Very often yes. But also as access roads to infrastructure like long-distance power transmission lines, pipelines, or remote communication towers. Also, there are a lot of fire roads. People don't think of the desert as a place of wildfires, but the desert does indeed burn.
- detaro 4y ago
  easy to create a road, and little that will destroy an old and little-used one.
  - justinator 4y ago
    There is the pressure to build the road in the first place, as there is about 1.5 billion cars in existence. Having it impossible to find really truly remote places is a symptom of just how much cars have absolutely changed the world. There's the idea that for every car, you need three car-sized spaces to support it: The area you park the car, the area you drive the car, and the area you'll be driving the car to. That's a lot of roads.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Many of the dirt roads predate the car; cars almost universally demand paved roads, but wagons want roads, too.
      - justinator 4y ago
        There are more cars in existence now, than every wagon every built in all of human civilization combined. There are also now, more roads.
    - detaro 4y ago
      Somehow I doubt that's very relevant to random wilderness roads in the desert
    - jstanley 4y ago
      If we're being pedantic, I think you only need 2 of those spaces while driving the car, and only 1 while it's parked.
- burkaman 4y ago
  Was this site hacked to add the crypto reference on the home page? The rest of the site is very interesting and has nothing to do with crypto, but it seems like a lot of internal pages have been removed and the links redirected to that weird home page. Edit: Yes, looks like the site has been defaced https://web.archive.org/web/20170611015950/https://remotefootprints.org https://web.archive.org/web/20170611015950/https://remotefoo.... Very sad, seemed like a really cool project and now a lot of pages are unreachable with going through archive.org. Even the search doesn't work. Edit 2: I think they lost control of that domain, but they have a new site at https://www.projectremote.com/ https://www.projectremote.com/
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Thank you - I'll update.
xcskier56 4y ago
There’s a fun website that I saw that listed all of the most remote points in the lower 48. This is defined as farthest away from a road. Amazingly, given all of the vast land in the western US, the furthest you can get from a road is only a little over 20 miles. This is in the middle of the Thoroughfare in Yellowstone NP.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I wonder what the definition of road here is. Plenty of roads are just tracks in the dirt where enough vehicles have traveled to leave a mark like logging roads and such.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Unpaved road covers a lot of ground in the western US--from unpaved but well-graded and maintained to you'd better have high-clearance 4WD and know how to use it--in appropriate weather. And the map databases aren't necessarily great at distinguishing things at the edges.
    - reaperducer 4y ago
      And the map databases aren't necessarily great at distinguishing things at the edges Very true. I once had Apple Maps direct me down a one-lane road that turned into gravel 20 miles later, then into dirt 20 miles after that, and then eventually became just ruts in the sand used by horses and mules. I'm sure it was used as a "road" to calculate distances between places, but it was in no way a road.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        I have a general "do not leave paved roads when following GPS" rule to prevent things like death (which have occurred). You should know what you're doing and be prepared if you leave the pavement.
        4y ago
nonethewiser 4y ago
Go to the boundary waters. Huge (1million sq acres) Easy to navigate (canoe), sparsely visited, very remote, and no engines allowed. I don’t know what the furthest distance from a road is. But I would warn against using that as some definitive measure of remoteness. Especially since not all roads are equal. There are lots of rarely used dirt roads. Additionally, the boundary waters are far from any significant metro (5 hours to twin cities) and very far from a large metro (9 hours to Chicago). The people that go are in driving distance, and there aren’t that many. Compare that to Denver which is not only 1-2 hours away, but has an airport which receives tons of people from the west coast and beyond. There is also virtually 0 traffic from the north because it’s an international border and more remote wilderness.
- justinator 4y ago
  >I don’t know what the furthest distance from a road is Looks around 11 miles, https://www.peakbagger.com/map/bigmap.aspx?t=W&l=CT&d=10&cx=-91.0631&cy=47.9896&rad=10.52&minx=-91.2906&miny=47.8373&maxx=-90.8356&maxy=48.1419&hj=0 https://www.peakbagger.com/map/bigmap.aspx?t=W&l=CT&d=10&cx=...
- mauvehaus 4y ago
  You're probably aware of this, but motorboats are allowed (up to some size and power restrictions) on e.g. the Moose Lake chain to Basswood/Prairie Portage, large parts of Basswood, and Snowbank, among others. They'll also land the forest service's Beaver on any lake big enough for a medical evacuation (I facilitated one from another group from Alice years back). Not trying to pick nuts, I'd just hate for someone to show up up there and be very disappointed by the presence of motorboats. If you're planning a trip, it's not hard to avoid them. Talk to your outfitter and do a couple of portages and you'll see none. Do a couple more portages and you can go a couple of days without seeing other people. Oh, and get up-to-date maps. I was using ones from the summer I guided some 15 years later, and found a campsite or two that had been closed since mine were printed. Some bonus paddling resulted. Hol-Ry!
kleiba 4y ago
I currently live in central Europe, and just recently had a conversation with a coworker who is local. He told me how he has always been quite impressed with how much space there is North America - which is to say that you actually can get away from civilization quite a bit if you want to. Of course, that's not true for all areas of America but it seems way more difficult to just get away in central Europe.
- justinator 4y ago
  Funny that I go to Europe and impressed by how many trains there are.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bombcar 4y ago
  Central Europe is more properly compared to the East or Midwest in the USA; because the ability to grow stuff means that even the very rural parts of those areas of the USA are sparsely populated, but populated (you're never more than a few miles from a house kind of thing). But once you hit the west of the Rockies, it becomes VERY EMPTY unlike anything in Europe, perhaps comparable only to the Ghobi Desert or similar places in Asia.
paddy_m 4y ago
I miss driving across vast stretches of emptiness in Utah, which is somewhat related. I would see these vast spaces and want to explore, via bike, dirt bike or foot. Another fun, related cartography activity is to find the longest drive between two very close points on a map. You're invariably going around a mountain with pretty scenery.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
I feel like not enough people have noted that "furthest point from a road" is a very different metric than "longest straight line without crossing a road" [0] It's clear to me that you got that distinction, but several replies seemed to have missed it. [0] and specifically, in the UK, the middle of Rannoch Moor is the most remote from any road, but doesn't much in terms of longest straight line without a road crossing. And likewise, the line in TFA is actually not very far from a road at any time.

bombcar 4y ago

Part of the issue is that the vast western BLM land in the USA is mostly some variation of desert; and that desert is very VERY easy to put a road down on, if all the road is a slightly graded path. I assume you've seen https://www.projectremote.com/remote-statistics/ https://www.projectremote.com/remote-statistics/ (updated from defaced/hacked domain)

justinator 4y ago
hmm, I think though there's a reason that the road exists - even in the desert? Probably to mine or a mine town originally? Same with all the roads in the mountains. Resource extraction and motor vehicles kinda go hand in hand.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Most of the ones I've encountered in the high desert have things like ancient mining claims or tiny towns somewhere, but others appear to simply be 4WD trails that have been used "enough". According to the link; Wyoming has the furthest at 21 miles from a road (which is a circle containing 1385 sq miles). Since distance from a road is a circle, the sq miles needed to get far from it go fast quickly, even six miles is 113 sq mile, and since it's likely a road alongside one edge, you're talking a square of land at least 144 sq mile. The only things that big are usually parks/nature reserves of some kind, and they often have fire roads or other accesses built for reasons (including people camping, etc).
  - justinator 4y ago
    I've got that point as somewhere near the middle of of Yellowstone NP. The farthest point in Rocky Mountain National Park from is 6. It takes the wind out of me.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      In some weird way it's the "no most boring number" problem; if a point is the most remote, then there's a reason to build a road to it, because it's a point of interest, but doing so kills the remoteness. Personally given how wide a range of things "dirt road" covers, I would consider paved road to be the line - some things that are dirt roads you can do 50+ mph down no problem, others are literally impassible without the best 4 wheel drive vehicles; and some not even that - they're technically on the map but the road is overgrown so much that you can barely get a motorbike down it; and once you're using a motorbike you can go almost anywhere in the world that humans can reach.
  - scythe 4y ago
    Depending on your definition of "mainland", you can get even more remote in southern Louisiana on the peninsula south of Fourleague Bay, southeast of the Atchafalaya Delta. Google Maps shows it as around 26 miles from any road. But most of the corresponding "circle" will then be in the ocean.
    - justinator 4y ago
      Ha - yeah, if the land is basically an island, there may be an exception. If we look at the map from the article, looks like they avoided major waterways as well.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        One of the terms thrown around is "navigable" - which includes things like roads, airports, and waterways that can be traversed by (usually motor) boat. Obviously since helicopters can land on Mt Everest, you ignore those. https://unofficialnetworks.com/2022/12/29/helicopter-land-summit-everest/ https://unofficialnetworks.com/2022/12/29/helicopter-land-su... One of the amusing things is that it is not that hard to get away from people - you only need to be about 270 miles from the nearest human to get a situation where that nearest human is in the International Space Station flying overhead. But you have to map out airliner routes, etc, as planes will fly over otherwise empty land/ocean.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Probably to mine or a mine town originally? Very often yes. But also as access roads to infrastructure like long-distance power transmission lines, pipelines, or remote communication towers. Also, there are a lot of fire roads. People don't think of the desert as a place of wildfires, but the desert does indeed burn.
detaro 4y ago
easy to create a road, and little that will destroy an old and little-used one.
- justinator 4y ago
  There is the pressure to build the road in the first place, as there is about 1.5 billion cars in existence. Having it impossible to find really truly remote places is a symptom of just how much cars have absolutely changed the world. There's the idea that for every car, you need three car-sized spaces to support it: The area you park the car, the area you drive the car, and the area you'll be driving the car to. That's a lot of roads.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Many of the dirt roads predate the car; cars almost universally demand paved roads, but wagons want roads, too.
    - justinator 4y ago
      There are more cars in existence now, than every wagon every built in all of human civilization combined. There are also now, more roads.
  - detaro 4y ago
    Somehow I doubt that's very relevant to random wilderness roads in the desert
  - jstanley 4y ago
    If we're being pedantic, I think you only need 2 of those spaces while driving the car, and only 1 while it's parked.
burkaman 4y ago
Was this site hacked to add the crypto reference on the home page? The rest of the site is very interesting and has nothing to do with crypto, but it seems like a lot of internal pages have been removed and the links redirected to that weird home page. Edit: Yes, looks like the site has been defaced https://web.archive.org/web/20170611015950/https://remotefootprints.org https://web.archive.org/web/20170611015950/https://remotefoo.... Very sad, seemed like a really cool project and now a lot of pages are unreachable with going through archive.org. Even the search doesn't work. Edit 2: I think they lost control of that domain, but they have a new site at https://www.projectremote.com/ https://www.projectremote.com/
- bombcar 4y ago
  Thank you - I'll update.

xcskier56 4y ago

There’s a fun website that I saw that listed all of the most remote points in the lower 48. This is defined as farthest away from a road. Amazingly, given all of the vast land in the western US, the furthest you can get from a road is only a little over 20 miles. This is in the middle of the Thoroughfare in Yellowstone NP.

colechristensen 4y ago
I wonder what the definition of road here is. Plenty of roads are just tracks in the dirt where enough vehicles have traveled to leave a mark like logging roads and such.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Unpaved road covers a lot of ground in the western US--from unpaved but well-graded and maintained to you'd better have high-clearance 4WD and know how to use it--in appropriate weather. And the map databases aren't necessarily great at distinguishing things at the edges.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    And the map databases aren't necessarily great at distinguishing things at the edges Very true. I once had Apple Maps direct me down a one-lane road that turned into gravel 20 miles later, then into dirt 20 miles after that, and then eventually became just ruts in the sand used by horses and mules. I'm sure it was used as a "road" to calculate distances between places, but it was in no way a road.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I have a general "do not leave paved roads when following GPS" rule to prevent things like death (which have occurred). You should know what you're doing and be prepared if you leave the pavement.
      - 4y ago

nonethewiser 4y ago

Go to the boundary waters. Huge (1million sq acres) Easy to navigate (canoe), sparsely visited, very remote, and no engines allowed. I don’t know what the furthest distance from a road is. But I would warn against using that as some definitive measure of remoteness. Especially since not all roads are equal. There are lots of rarely used dirt roads. Additionally, the boundary waters are far from any significant metro (5 hours to twin cities) and very far from a large metro (9 hours to Chicago). The people that go are in driving distance, and there aren’t that many. Compare that to Denver which is not only 1-2 hours away, but has an airport which receives tons of people from the west coast and beyond. There is also virtually 0 traffic from the north because it’s an international border and more remote wilderness.

justinator 4y ago
>I don’t know what the furthest distance from a road is Looks around 11 miles, https://www.peakbagger.com/map/bigmap.aspx?t=W&l=CT&d=10&cx=-91.0631&cy=47.9896&rad=10.52&minx=-91.2906&miny=47.8373&maxx=-90.8356&maxy=48.1419&hj=0 https://www.peakbagger.com/map/bigmap.aspx?t=W&l=CT&d=10&cx=...
mauvehaus 4y ago
You're probably aware of this, but motorboats are allowed (up to some size and power restrictions) on e.g. the Moose Lake chain to Basswood/Prairie Portage, large parts of Basswood, and Snowbank, among others. They'll also land the forest service's Beaver on any lake big enough for a medical evacuation (I facilitated one from another group from Alice years back). Not trying to pick nuts, I'd just hate for someone to show up up there and be very disappointed by the presence of motorboats. If you're planning a trip, it's not hard to avoid them. Talk to your outfitter and do a couple of portages and you'll see none. Do a couple more portages and you can go a couple of days without seeing other people. Oh, and get up-to-date maps. I was using ones from the summer I guided some 15 years later, and found a campsite or two that had been closed since mine were printed. Some bonus paddling resulted. Hol-Ry!

kleiba 4y ago

I currently live in central Europe, and just recently had a conversation with a coworker who is local. He told me how he has always been quite impressed with how much space there is North America - which is to say that you actually can get away from civilization quite a bit if you want to. Of course, that's not true for all areas of America but it seems way more difficult to just get away in central Europe.

justinator 4y ago
Funny that I go to Europe and impressed by how many trains there are.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bombcar 4y ago
Central Europe is more properly compared to the East or Midwest in the USA; because the ability to grow stuff means that even the very rural parts of those areas of the USA are sparsely populated, but populated (you're never more than a few miles from a house kind of thing). But once you hit the west of the Rockies, it becomes VERY EMPTY unlike anything in Europe, perhaps comparable only to the Ghobi Desert or similar places in Asia.

paddy_m 4y ago

I miss driving across vast stretches of emptiness in Utah, which is somewhat related. I would see these vast spaces and want to explore, via bike, dirt bike or foot. Another fun, related cartography activity is to find the longest drive between two very close points on a map. You're invariably going around a mountain with pretty scenery.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

I feel like not enough people have noted that "furthest point from a road" is a very different metric than "longest straight line without crossing a road" [0] It's clear to me that you got that distinction, but several replies seemed to have missed it. [0] and specifically, in the UK, the middle of Rannoch Moor is the most remote from any road, but doesn't much in terms of longest straight line without a road crossing. And likewise, the line in TFA is actually not very far from a road at any time.