The thing about the outback of Arkansas is if you have a mishap or a car problem any place you can walk to will most likely not have help to offer. Some places still have no landlines.
Cel service can be spotty.
There are homes with no cars.
It makes you feel further out than you really are.
I think here in Hawaii, we are the farthest from any major point of land as you can get.
I have roamed around Owyhee country. It is really quite lovely. As noted, Butte and similar places in Montana are much uglier. Nevermind large chunks of the LA area.
In terms of remoteness from roads and such, this area is also pretty empty. I remember an old set of maps show coloring areas that were within 10 miles of a paved road, RR line, navigable waterway, etc. This area was notably un-colored.
The “still” part is actually going the other way. Remote areas of the West that had landlines have lost service due to the cost of maintaining the lines plus the issue of copper theft. If you are in a remote area and have no landline, you will likely never get it. If you have it, it may go away.
The tri-state (!) area I gave is also quite poorly covered by cell phone service.
This webpage may suggest places to look. It’s a map of the U.S. based on 2010 census; one dot = one person!
I think that the OP gave a fairly unambiguous definition of “somewhere”; the difficulty is just that the OP’s definition differs from other commonly-used definitions (for instance, the OP doesn’t care about nearby roads).
It looks like the south east corner of San Juan County, Colorado is going to at least be in the running. Its about 15 miles from Sliverton and I know there are some houses around the Vallecito reservoir to the south about 15 miles. There may be room to leave the county and go further east too since the next houses are by 631 but its hard to pick out on my phone map.
My take on the Op’s definition is for road/hike distance rather than straight line. My first thought was of Fish Springs but I see there is a church in Trout Creek (25 straight line miles, 33 road miles) away. Second was Henry Mountains, but the best I could get was about 40 road miles from Hanksville/Bullfrog.
Best I’ve found was Hole in the Rock. 60 miles of dirt road out of Escalante. It’s only 17 miles straight line from Hall’s Crossing, but the only way to go that in 17 miles would be by helicoptor. Was about 50 boat miles to Bullfrog Marina.
Toroweap Overlook is a contender. 60 miles out of Colorado City. Only 20 straight line miles from Supai, but again that would be helicopter miles. Fastest way to cover that distance on the ground would probably be to drive all the way around the Grand Canyon and then hike down to Supai.
Actually that goes to the island of Tristan da Cunha in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.
Of course, you can get more remote than that if you skip having to be on land. The furthest point from any land whatsoever goes to Point Nemo in the far South Pacific ocean.
The section of the Appalachian Trail in Maine, known as “100 mile wilderness” must fit in here somehow.
I think a better scenario is, you’re in a plane crash (or whatever) somewhere in the lower 48. What is the farthest you could walk in a straight line and never encounter any human-built thing that could help you stay alive or get to civilization? No shelter, no road, no sign, no bridge, no nothing.
When I read about Christopher McCandless, subject of Into the Wild, the main reason he died is he would make expeditions out from the bus in different directions and never found any trace of anything indicating there were humans nearby. He got very close sometimes, but not quite.
Eh, the longest distance you can walk in a straight line without encountering a road would probably be right next to a road. And the record in that category would necessarily be a point where there is a road or other piece of civilization right directly behind your starting point, which makes it hard to call that starting point “remote”.
The basic premise is how far away you can get from any such feature (“town”), as in the “anything” in the title, not how far it is from one to another. Right next to is not very far from.
I’ll grant it is pretty ugly, but there are large swaths of North Dakota I would be happy to never drive through again. At least Hwy 395 is on the way to something; turn west at Hwy 20 and you end up in Bend, OR. Hwy 2 just seems to be an endless loop repeating through Minot, which has no reason to exist in heaven or on Earth.
Stranger
See Post #18.
I don’t know. I used to make the run from San Bernardino to Pullman fairly regularly up the 395/12. That stretch around Oregon is really ugly.
Minot, I’ll grant you.
OP doesn’t preclude roads so after too little research I’ll go with a spot in southwest Owyhee County, Idaho. If we don’t count certain military structures as “businesses” then I’d also nominate some desert-country artillery ranges.
Bend??? You seriously think that is not teh ugliness? I remember what the Bend-Redmond-Sisters area looked like in the '60s, and that mess these days is, well, you might as well go to Tahoe, or Bozeman. Sisters, especially, has just gone right into the gentrification dumpster.
Oh, and the reason Minot exists is because that is where the rail line construction ended up stalling for the winter.
Something wrong with Bozeman?
This seems to be a bit of a different question. If you don’t know the road or trail is 1 mile in a certain direction, you might just head off in the completely wrong direction. So if you are in a plane crash in the middle of nowhere, you might need to pick a direction to start walking. If you do that, what is the farthest you’d ever need to travel to find civilization? Yes, there could be a town right behind you or, as Chronos noted, you could be paralleling a road for miles and miles and not even know it.
I recall when Bozeman was a town. Last time we were there, it seemed to have become all coloradificated.