The quote below is from a New York Times Opinion piece,
Crushing Steel and Concrete
Paul Greenberg?ÿand?ÿ
"In the Lower 48, the farthest one can get from a road is about 20 miles, according to a forthcoming book by the environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb."
Does anybody know of a point in the lower 48 that is, say, 30 miles from a road?
That's going to depend on your definition of a road. Does a dirt path count? Does it have to be maintained by a government entity?
I'm thinking maybe a state, county or federal numbered road. Dirt ok, but 4wd trails excluded. I have no idea what definition the author used.
Maybe somewhere in Nevada?????ÿ There are places in the Rockies with no real roads for miles, but I don't know how many is the max.
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Googling found this answer.?ÿ Don't know if it correct or not.
The remotest spot in America??s lower 48 is in Wyoming??s Yellowstone National Park, 21.5 miles from a road, a half-mile from a privately owned cabin, and a half-mile from a foot trail
Found this on isolated towns, which, of course, depends on your definition of a city.
Glasgow, Montana is a random town with a randomly chosen name.
In February, the?ÿhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/20/using-the-best-data-possible-we-set-out-to-find-the-middle-of-nowhere/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.947631afd0e2" }">Washington Post?ÿused this database to study the contiguous United States. In the lower 48 states, 98 percent of us are less than an hour away from an urban area. But the Oxford data can now tell us what American town is farthest from "civilization" (here defined as a metro area with more than 75,000 people). Glasgow, Montana, near the Canadian border, is the "middle of nowhere" in rural America, 4.5 hours from a city in any direction. It's a prairie town that's been in decline since the nearby air force base was closed in 1976. It was named after Glasgow,?ÿScotland?ÿby a railway clerk randomly spinning a globe in 1887.
The highways of Idaho are the road to nowhere.
The runner-up isolated Americans, according to the?ÿPost, are in Montana towns near Glasgow, like Scobey and Wolf Point. Almost as hard to get to are certain towns in western Kansas, or the Nevada desert, or the Trans-Pecos area of Texas. The loneliest small city??population of 25,000 or more??is Garden City, in southwest Kansas. And leaving towns and cities aside, the most remote place of all is the aptly named River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho, the largest federal wilderness in the lower 48 states. From its Salmon River Canyon, it would take you well over a week to hike and then drive yourself back to the nearest suburb.
Road is generally something that you can get a blade down, and that the county actually will consider using for emergencies.
Mosquito Pass breeches 13k feet Msl and is driveable with some skill and a decent vehicle, so yeah roads definition needs to be better understood.?ÿ I've been to places in Nevada that were solid 10 miles to the nearest road by map, and planned well inadvance if we were ever stranded there and how to play it out. 20 cold be possible.
Playing around on Google Earth it appears there are some large areas of Utah south of I-80 and not far east of the Nevada border that are mighty desolate.?ÿ Going in close, though, shows some lines that appear to be roads with zero maintenance.?ÿ Year-round habitations seem to be largely absent.
The big empty area north of and largely south of 80 is the UTTR AKA UTAH TEST AND TRAINING RANGE.
They did lots of fun stuff back in the day, like burn nerve gas, test launch V2 rockets, burn and bury biological warfare stuff. Good place to not try to go hiking. Worked in environmental science and was working on some proposals for the area.?ÿ
Conversely, I spent months up in the northeast corner of Nevada doing magnetic work on the Winecup Gamble ranch and that was Just shy of 1million acres, and adjacent to land that the utah construction company used to own turn of last century at just less than 3million acres....lots of space back then....
I could drive 50 miles or more in any direction and be no where near the outer boundary.?ÿ That's a big yard for sure.
Lest ye forget the mysterious metal oblisqe
For clarification I assume they mean 20 miles in every direction, so 1256 square miles without a road??ÿ Almost 35 townships without a single road??ÿ Seems unlikely when I think about it this way, but I suppose it's possible.
Yes, I was thinking about a single point at the center of a circle with a radius of more than 20 miles.
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The quote below is from a New York Times Opinion piece.....
This also sums it up too....
Central Park although huge and seemingly wild is the only outdoors millions of NYC people think of as the WILD and scary outdoors.
Perspective varies on bias based upon location.
A friend of mine went o Mongolia for geophysical work. Je said compared to Nevada and even Alaska he felt eerily isolated and detached.
That was my initial thought.?ÿ Realistically, may times that nearest road could be two miles from you as the crow flies and forty miles to get there with a vehicle.
Little Hammock, Point Au Fer Island, Terrebonne Parish, LA?ÿ29.300222?ø,-91.327669?ø
One of my favorites. The ferry crossing is less than 4 miles, but it takes 35 minutes in addition to time required for loading and unloading cars. So longer distance is shorter time, but the ferry ride is entertainment, so it's not apples to apples.
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Does anybody know of a point in the lower 48 that is, say, 30 miles from a road?
I depends on your definition of "road". The woods in Oregon are laced with old logging roads which you might have trouble walking, let alone driving on. In certain eastern parts of the state some of the roads are little more than the tire tracks of the last vehicle to pass that way.?ÿ
Took the Valley View Ferry once across the Kentucky River to get from Lexington to Richmond, Kentucky.?ÿ If you are on one side and choose to drive around instead of taking the ferry, it is a LONGGGG way.
If you take the criteria in the original query the location at 44?ø23'N, 87?ø08'W is in the lower 48 and is about 40 miles in any direction from any road.
People travelling in the region sometimes can't get their head around how empty it is. One couple from England driving up to a family get together put it this way:
"I put the car rental's FM radio on seek and it couldn't find a station"