Poles of Inaccessibility in the San Gabriel Mountains(notes.secretsauce.net) |
Poles of Inaccessibility in the San Gabriel Mountains(notes.secretsauce.net) |
https://web.archive.org/web/20240621094642/https://www.proje...
The most surprising one to me is: Least Remote: Kansas (0.8 miles from a road).
As someone who lives in the very densely populated greater Boston area, Kansas doesn't exactly strike me as a prime candidate for not being able to get away from roads.
Their website seems to have been commandeered by some Indonesian online casino scam thing in late 2024 and is now offline. I'm unsure of the ongoing state of the project.
Edit: they have another page describing Alaska. It seems that the linked page might only describe the contiguous US? But also, wow. This seems stupid:
> Thoughts of roadless Alaska came to mind and our amazing, wild trek through the Brooks Range of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We hired a bush plane to drop us off in a nameless valley. At 50 miles from the nearest village or road, we were awed with excitement and healthy fear. We agreed to meet up 9 days and 35 miles later at a flat spot where he could land on the tundra marked by a heap of moose antlers. He looked at us awfully cock-eyed when we told him we had no satellite phone. He asked, “well, why not?” We told him that we were deliberately here to remove ourselves from civilization and contact with it. Watching our pilot fly away, we realized we were as far from towns and roads, and therefore, humans as we could possibly imagine.
*technically not remote at all in this context as they all took place on trails
"Towns" on a map might literally be a single home up there. It's as remote as can be even alongside utility roads.
https://www.treehugger.com/special-places-in-the-san-gabriel...
Also probably context for many LA people, as most seem to consider those mountains a Hollywood backdrop, not a place you can be in 90 minutes from anywhere in LA (with favorable traffic).
The path was added to OSM two years ago, which is after the analysis was done. OSM is a moving target!
[1]: https://ironhiker.blogspot.com/2025/08/baden-powell-x3-and-r...