I lived in southwest Wyoming for 16 years and did a lot of hiking around in the Uinta mountains. They don’t get a lot of traffick there. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out I was as much as 20 miles from another person several times.
I don’t know - never very far, I don’t really get out much. I’m not really one for hiking or mountain climbing or anything like that.
Strange to think about, but honestly I’ve probably never been more then 500 feet or so from another person.
Probably no more than five or six miles while on a day hike into a national forest in the winter.
If I pretend I was alone in the car, I’m sure there were a few moments when I was much further away from anyone on a road trip that took us through Wyoming and all the four corners states.
Maybe in the Adirondacks, when I walked a mile or so along a well-marked path from a camp in the woods, out of earshot of the people I came with. It was SO quiet. No traffic, no airplanes, no noise from civilization. I imagined the woods looking just as they did centuries ago.
Driving in our motorhome through Spain, we crossed a huge flat empty plain. At the other side, we went up the ridge and found a little space off the road at the top of the mountain where we spent the night. In one direction, way below us, the plain we’d just crossed without seeing a soul. In the other direction, a nature reserve way down below us, with not a single dwelling. We watched for campfires, lights, anything, but the road was almost deserted and we saw nothing. Looking at the map there was no settlement in I don’t know what distance. My partner was there, of course, but other than us I would safely guess that there wasn’t another person for at least 60 km.
Not the most emotionally isolated place I’ve ever slept, though. That may be the Lochnagar Crater. We’d been to see it, and having done so found ourselves so exhausted that neither of us was fit to drive. I never thought I would be able to sleep in the middle of what is basically a huge war grave, but we did, fantastically well.
North out of Fairbanks there was once a sign to the affect ‘no service for the next 750 miles’. We went up there for a couple of hours, probably 60 miles and saw nothing except one rodent.
I’ve been up that way. Yep, probably about the most middle of nowhere you can be and still be on a real road.
IIRC North of Las Vegas is almost as bad. Headed north out there its 250 miles or so to Great Basin National Monument, with a couple of one stop light towns between the two.
Yeah, that’s what the northern Manitoba woods were like, too. I liked it.