I was walking alone last night, on a fairly long and quiet country road, with probably a clear mile of road in either direction before a car or pedestrian would be found, but then when I looked off to one side, there was a little cottage maybe half a mile off, with lights on, so probably someone in there.
And it occurred to me, I don’t know that I have ever, in my life, been more than a mile or two away from the nearest other human. The UK is pretty densely populated, so it’s actually quite tricky to be a long way away from everyone else.
So, what’s the furthest distance you have ever been, away from other humans? Rules:
If someone else was right there with you, it doesn’t count (so if you went to the moon with another astronaut, sorry, that’s impressive, and you both were a long way away from everyone else, but it’s not what I’m looking for, because you were not away from all other humans)
Obviously there are a lot of situations where you can’t always be completely sure there wasn’t another hiker on the other side of the ridge, or another solo fisherman somewhere else nearby in the middle of the Pacific, or whatever, so use your best judgment and reasoning on that.
Distance away is ‘as the crow flies’, so if you walked alone up one of those really ziggy-zaggy mountain roads, you might have travelled a long way, but only the linear distance (or great circle, I suppose) from the nearest human counts.
Australia isn’t; and coming from the Bush (not the Outback’s much more expansive options) the possibilities are both more frequent and of greater scale.
Doing some chores on one of the family farms when the rest of the family were off the property would have put an exclusion zone of 10-12km, assuming the neighbours were also home.
But for an assured sense of isolation, (as I have posted before) when travelling home one route was via Steam Plains Road where a one point you had a 360 degree view of the horizon without seeing any sentinent life-form, man-made structure, hill or hollow or tree for that matter. So that would be about 7km and likely close to the maximum assured distance possible.
Looking at a map, probably somewhere along Canada Highway 4 or 97. The Alcan gets sparse in places, and when I last drove in back in October 1982, it was mostly unpaved. You could drive a good hour without ever seeing an oncoming vehicle.
I can’t think of a time where the answer would have been “no more than 5 miles away.” The times when I’ve been out in the “middle of nowhere,” such as at a national park, I’ve always had at least one other person with me.
There have certainly been times when I’ve been driving alone on a quiet highway, but even then, it’s probably never been more than a couple of minutes in between seeing other cars – and the areas I’ve been driving through have largely been farmland, not wilderness, so there were undoubtedly farmers or local residents not too far off the highway.
I have driven back roads in Montana that I believe have taken me at least 20 miles from any other human. I can’t prove it, but it’s highly likely. The population density of Montana is only 7.7 people per square mile, and the state is 147,040 square miles in size. It’s easy to get lost if you don’t know where you’re going.
I used to take my ‘adventure’ motorcycle and go for long solo rides w/food, water, and camping gear. In my youth, I’d be on road trips in the middle of nowhere, and you’d see side roads and wonder where they went. That’s what inspired me to buy the bike.
So I’ve ridden a fair amount in the West, aiming to determine just that: where do those ‘roads’ go??
The one time I picked up in irreparable (tire) puncture in rural Wyoming, I had to walk for about three hours (no cell service) before I found a house with a phone, and figured out a way to get (mostly) recovered.
So … without actually knowing … I’d have to say I’ve been 20+ miles from another human being quite a few times.
Probably somewhere on the road in between towns in Western Australia or the Northern Territories. There were several times when I drove for 20 minutes or more without seeing a single soul.(Lots of kangaroo roadkill though)
Good question. I must admit: I don’t know. I’ll think about it, but my first anwser would be on a motorcycle too. Scotland, North-Eastern Highlands. I will look on maps on-line later, would guess at anything between 3 and 20 km at some point, and 20 km seems optimistic. But apart from that, probably never more than a couple of hundred meters, if at all. Mostly less.
Very had to tell. I have driven quite a bit in Northern Scotland where on occasion you might be 3 or 5 miles from a house (which may or may not be occupied and it might be 10 minutes between vehicles going past in the opposite direction implying they might be 5-10 miles apart so I suspect it would be in the 3-5 mile range.
I have also driven, less frequently is less populated areas on the US and Canada. The most likely candidates are:
Touring the National Parks of Utah and Arizona, I drove Pheonix - Las Vegas - Zion - Bryce Canyon - Capital Reef - Moab - Grand Canyon, Flagstaff - Pheonix, on this trip I took advantage of jet lag,going to bed about 9pm and getting up abput 5am in order to my driving forst thing in the morning when the roads were quiet and I could arrive at my destination in time ot have a full day at the park.
Driving from Yellowstone to a Dude Ranch near Sheridan WY
I remember some of the roads were very quite and isolated but I have no idea how much so.
I think this is similar to my answer. There are a few times that I was taking the off-interstate back roads doing a red-eye drive in New Mexico. The sort of stretches where you see a road sign saying things like “no services next 47 miles”. No lights anywhere, just the road signs and reflectors, and loooong stretches where it would be 30 minutes before you saw a light in the distance, or someone’s headlights come up behind or tail-lights ahead.
It was very uncommon because there’s normally enough traffic on the roads during daylight hours to make it a non-issue, but that 2am-4am time frame feels really empty. I only had to do it a few times thankfully. Similarly, the stretch heading east from Raton NM until nearly the Texas border is pretty deserted, but I only did that ONCE as a late night drive, and it didn’t count anyway because my wife was in the car with me.
A tricky one… I’ve had the Buddy System pretty well ingrained into my habits, from Boy Scouts, so any time I go out into the Middle Of Nowhere, I have at least one other person with me. I imagine my personal record would be some time I was with a group of people at a cabin or some such and everyone but me left on some errand while I stayed alone in the cabin, but I can’t think of any specific instance.
There were some times when I was in Montana where I was biking to someplace far-ish out of town, and was surrounded by farm fields, but even then, I wouldn’t have been more than a couple of furlongs from the farm houses.
I think most of us would double or maybe 10x our personal best distance if we got the “astronaut exception”. IOW the poster is part of a pair of people doing [whatever] together and the measure of merit for the question is the distance from the pair to the rest of humanity.
I’m guessing around 10 miles solo backpacking in Tibet. 2 day hike on a mountain trail in either direction back when I was in great shape to another person. Certainly more than 10 miles from a dirt road. A lone nomadic horseman may have been closer but no way to figure that out.
Like other posters, I’ve been in some quite remote areas, but with at least one other person with me. Probably the time I was the farthest away from other people was Wyoming, where there are stretches of highway that have nothing whatsoever for many miles. Once I was driving home from Canada through that part of the world, with my dog, listening to CDs of Ian MacKellen reciting the Odyssey, and I was so engrossed I blithely passed through the last town for fifty miles and very nearly ran out of gas out there. Had a scare.
I’ve been up mountains, and across large farm fields, and in the middle of the ocean, but never entirely alone, or far from a house or road, so I guess the best would be around 1km, maybe 1.5km. Because I don’t drive, I am almost always accompanied everywhere.
Sadly, I can’t think of any time I was out of (relative) nearness to another human being, more’s the shame. It’s awfully peoply out there. Probably the furthest has been maybe a mile, while bird hunting with a group of people, and deciding I wanted to go a different way than they wanted to go.
Alone by myself would be driving in the area where Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico meet. There were yard lights in the distance, but no other traffic. It’s not really that far from all other civilization, but what made it eerie was that it was a an hour after sunset. All along and at the sides of the road, mile after mile, I could see pairs of eyeballs, being lit by my headlights. I stopped to take a look: it was hundreds and hundreds of rabbits. Freaky.
Apparently, furthest you can be from a road in the US (lower 48 states) is 21.7 miles.
…the average remote spot was 6.8 miles from a road, and 0.8 miles from a trail. Almost two-thirds had mobile phone coverage.
In the lower 48 mainland, the place furthest from a road - and therefore the remotest spot on the United States mainland - is in the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
It is 21.7 miles from a road, and required a week-long, 75-mile hike to get there and back. The spot itself is 0.7 miles uphill from the nearest trail.
Michael Collins of Apollo 11 holds this record – he was alone in lunar orbit while Armstrong & Aldrin went down onto the lunar surface. They were together, but he was all alone in the ship, orbiting 69 miles/110 km above the lunar surface where they were, and 238 thousand miles/384 thousand km away from all the rest of humanity.