I mean above ground of course. Have we been everywhere? Seen everything there is to see and mapped or surveyed every square inch? It’s these kinds of questions that plagued me.
(Please forgive me but there is no question intriguing enough out there to make me use the search feature on this board. I use it strictly for emergencies, my eyes glaze over when I even think about it.)
aha,
Being from Colorado, this sort question always enters my mind.
Could I possibly be the first human ever to step foot on a specific part of the ground? Of course if you want to get technical with errosion and other geological factors it is highly possible.
This of course stems from when I had my 4x4 Chevy truck and would go to some pretty out of the way places and hike with my dog.
My guess would be that there are some remote places that haven’t been physically visited, but airborne and space-based radar systems have mapped out pretty much every square inch of land.
I was in Columbia a few years ago “on business”. The local maps were remarkably incomplete. They just had white areas, with a sign saying that it was cloudy that day, so the aerial survey couldn’t be done.
Untouched by human hands? Probably some places in Antarctica and some of the higher elevation areas of the Himilayas. Maybe even some areas of the Sahara too. Well, come to think of it, any place that covers a very large area that is desolate and barren, like the aforesaid, would probably qualify.
Considering it’s size and density, there are parts of Alaska no-one has gotten to yet.
Good question, aha. I would be surprised if there is anyplace in the continental U.S. that hasn’t been seen by the naked eye, if you include being seen from airplanes. For something like that, you may have to go to either Antarctica or under the canopy of the Amazon rain forest.
On the other hand, if you mean somewhere no one has actually walked before, I’m sure you can find places in the continental U.S. to fit that description. There’s an area in Canyonlands National Park known as “The Maze” that would be a possiblity…
Do you mean above water, too? If the ocean floor counts, then there are huge expanses of land that have never been seen by human eyes.
As of about 10 years ago, there were mountain peaks in, among other places, California, Alaska, and Guyana, that hadn’t been reached by man. I’m sure there must be plenty of other places too. These are not generally the highest or most dangerous peaks, but tend to be rather unimpressive and remote peaks that don’t attract much attention.
It used to be that the first person who climbed a mountain got the honor of naming it. Since that is no longer the case, that’s one less incentive to potential climbers.
Go to Montana, Aha.
Cruise around Yellowstone National Park, or Glacier. There are many places that have not been explored yet by human feet. I was reading an article recently about the waterfalls of Yellowstone, there were over 300 new ones discovered in the past couple of years.
Glacier is mostly glaciers. There is a couple of roads thru the park, but most of the entire park is only visible and acessable by foot. That is a lot of park to wander around in.
Alaska has to be a lot like that, as well as a large part of Canada, and hey, what about Syberia?
Come to think of it, I doubt the Himalayas have been fully explored. 
Just for the record, a spot in s.e. Yellowstone is supposed to be the most remote spot in the lower 48, as judged by distance from a paved road. I’m a little dubious about this myself, but the source is a lady who was a park ranger there for 12 years, so she might know what she’s talking about.
-ellis
I saw the documentary “Ring of Fire” about a year and a half ago. It’s about volcanos. They showed lava (in Hawaii I think) flowing into the sea. They called this, “The newest land on Earth”. I don’t know if there is any new land right now, but I’m sure there will be some in your lifetime. If you want to be the first to set foot on this new land, move to the Pacific rim, and buy some asbestos shoes.
I have read that the Tepuis of the Guyana Highlands in Eastern Venezuela (Tepuis are these very heavily eroded Mesa-looking mountains) are very unexplored. There are dozens of these little mountains that no one has ever set foot on. This is supposed to be because it is extremely difficult to climb the soft eroding rock, and the conditions there are jungle-like and hellishly hot and insect infested. And there is nothing of interest or value to most people when you get to the top.
I also read once that a helicopter operator was advertising rides to “virgin ground”, where he would take people up and set them down on the top of a Tepui, so they could say they had been someplace no one else ever had. But IIRC, he was only going to one or two mountains that had suitable landing areas, and thus was ripping people off.
And do caves count as “virgin ground”? There are still opportunities in places for cavers to go places where no woman (or man) has ever gone before…
I can’t say definitively, but if people are still stumbling across previously-unknown features like waterfalls as recently as last year, it seems like some of the remoter parts of China/Tibet would be a good place to start looking.
Geez I meant “above water in my op”, sorry for any confusion.
Plenty of caves haven’t been mapped. Then there are wildernesses, also unmapped. I suppose if you got an atlas of the USA or the world you could check for barren areas.
Three years ago I organized an expedition in Panama to a small mountain range that had never been biologically surveyed previously, the Serrania de Jungurudo, in Darien. When we made our base camp at 850 m, my Embera Indian guides told me even they had never been to the spot before, and they had a big discussion about what they were going to name the place. They never go up there because there’s not much game, there’s little running water, and the going is extremely tough in the cloud forest. They just don’t bother. We never actually made it to the highest point of the range because chopping a trail was too difficult. My altimeter, though, indicated that the high point was probably a good 500 m lower than the best available published maps. While I can’t swear that no Indian has ever gone up there in the past 10,000 years, I think there’s a fair possibility that no one has ever set foot on that peak. There are no reliable maps for much of the Darien and several other parts of Panama (although radar/satellite images are available, they are not contour maps). I imagine that there are any number of minor peaks in Panama, especially the steeper ones, that no one has ever bothered to climb, no even an Indian. And much of the tropics, e.g. the tepuis, is even more unknown.
schief2, that cite looks suspisciously Eurocentric. They just now found these falls that they had heard of for over a century? Heard of from whom? It sounds like the natives have been there plenty of times, but of course, they don’t count :rolleyes:
My first thought on seeing the subject, too. But the OP said “above ground”. Of course, “virgin passage” is usually as suspicious a concept among cavers as the more general connotation suggested by the phrase …
Well, true…the link I posted implied that by “undiscovered” I meant “undiscovered by Western folks”, which wasn’t what I was trying to suggest. It just seems pretty likely to me that if there’s some places that are only now being finally, officially charted and mapped by Westerners in that part of the world, odds are there’s some places in the region that no one AT ALL has been to.