About 10 Km away from another human that I can be sure of. Started a canoe trip solo. Friend caught up to me the next afternoon. Neither of us saw another human around on our way out or back. No roads go further out from our start point. Only the small river.
I could scarcely guess, but if I had to, probably driving on a deserted highway somewhere in Texas, maybe 5-15 miles or so. There are a lot of stretches where there’s no visible habitation at all, and no suitable camping spots, so if I see no cars then I’m probably completely alone.
They could be tied with the spy-plane pilots like the U2 (Gary Powers flew alone) or the SR-71. Or their Russian and Chinese counterparts.
This made me think of solo sailors. Given the diversity of interests/experiences among posters, I’m surprised no one has offered their experience sailing alone - tho I imagine that is likely rather uncommon.
Me - not sure how often I’ve been more than 1-2 miles from another person. When I’ve travelled to/drove through relatively unpopulated areas, I’m pretty sure I’ve always been with my wife. We used to have access to a family property that was 1 mile by .5 mile, with very unused state and national forests on 2 sides. So I’m sure I was often at least 1-2 miles from anyone up there. So - in other words - not very far.
SR-71 carried 2 crewmembers. U-2 is solo.
But even so, what they overfly for the mission itself is “only” 10-15 miles straight down. Which is a big distance vertically, but pretty trivial horizontally. And whatever the target for today’s pix, it pretty much always has people staffing it.
Yes, they might have to cross oceans and uninhabited terrain to get there. But so are airliners and ships.
It really is getting hard to get far, far away from everyone else.
Furthest I’ve ever been was still probably no more than 5-6 miles at most, driving through some desolate terrain but still with villages not far off.
Wow. Same here I thought, until I remembered taking my friend’s Hobie Cat out from the beach in Hilton Head solo. I was about 5 miles from shore when I realized how f*cked I’d be if I lost my bearings, so I headed in.
I’ve paddled a divorce boat (tandem kayak) four or five miles from shore in the Caribbean, but my gf was there.
Yeah. Once the horizon looks the same in every direction it gets lonely out there in a baby boat. For sure you can roughly determine east from west via the sun’s position, but it’d be easy to be off by 45 degrees and have a very long sail back to near-shore, then another long sail (hopefully in the correct along-shore direction the first time) to reach your starting point.
I’ve done a bunch of solo small boat sailing offshore, but in SoCal the good news is there’s tall bluffs at most of the shore and real mountains just a few miles inland. So the land sticks up more and has more variety than the table-top flat and undifferentiated sameness of the US east coast or many (not all) Caribbean islands. So if the atmospheric visibility is good you can get a 10+ miles offshore before losing sight of land or the ability to tell roughly which bit of land to aim towards.
I’ve been up to ~40 miles offshore in larger sailboats, but never solo. And even then usually within sight of another sailboat or large freighter.
My first trip to Sint Maarten with my gf I spent some time on our balcony looking at the Caribbean. On the third morning I nearly shat my pajama pants. I could see a huge island where before there wasn’t one!!
It was Saba. When it is totally clear it is there. Any kind of overcast conditions and it is not.
Right in my own backyard is a 70 mile, single lane, hilly, and badly paved stretch of CA58 between Santa Margarita and McKittrick that no one who knows better would use to cross over from the 101 to the 5. Back when I didn’t know better, I saw no more than three vehicles coming from the other direction during the hour and a half drive. I never saw anyone ahead of me nor behind. There is nothing out there except dried up oil fields and automated solar farms and no homes or agriculture at all. I’m fairly confident I was, at least, ten miles away from another human being for most of the drive.
I drove across Canada, solo, in 1984 so there were probably times in the prairies and north around the great lakes that I could have been quite isolated. In the prairies it’s possible that there was no one, out to the horizon, 360 degrees for short periods of time.
I sincerely doubt that I’ve ever been more than a mile from another living human. I live in a rather sparsely-populated area of a rather sparsely-populated state (rural Missouri), but even here I doubt that any one house is more than a mile from any other house. I suppose there are certain points along the Missouri rivers that I’ve canoed upon where, geographically anyway, the nearest human settlement is more than a mile away (but probably not more than two), but in such situations I’ve always been in a canoe with another boater, no more than a few feet from another canoe with boaters in it. And on the busiest days of tourist season, those rivers can have hundreds of boaters on them.
Cue “Sound of Silence” and contemplate how one can be in actual solitude while surrounded by the teeming hordes.
I think the opposite is true: the U2 surely flew either over empty oceans, empty stretches of Siberia and/or over the arctic. Every now and then the horizontal distance to another human being must have been hundreds of kilometers. They did not want to be seen, after all.
Granted that the SR-71 had a co-pilot, that is true.
As it has been pointed out up thread that commercial airliners typically cruise about 8 mi above ground, that means that if you are on the ground, even if you are many, many miles from the nearest other person on the ground, you are still no more than 8 mi from somebody in an airliner cruising overhead.
There must be places in the world where airliners are not passing overhead in a continuous stream.
FWIW, solo circumnavigation of Antarctica has been a thing since 2008. My money is on one of those folks having the terrestrial record for isolation.
So did I! Hi, maybe once naighbor! ::waves:: Although I was but a lad of about 8 years old and it was only for ~9 months or so. My mother grew up on a farm north of Hingham and we lived for a spell on that same farm in the late 80’s.
Ca. 2009 I took my mother back to that farm to visit. It had long been abandoned and was no longer owned by anyone in the family. There were two houses within a ~6 mile radius but at the time the owners of those houses were both on vacation. My mother stayed the night with some old friends who lived north of Rudyard and I decided to stay the night in the old farmhouse, sleeping in a pile or blankets on the floor of of my old room. I was 6 miles from the nearest person, so that’s the farthest I’ve ever been from another person that I know of with any degree of certainty.
I did a lot of camping in my 20’s, some of it solo, and most of it in the national forests of the Cascades. While I felt like I was miles and miles and miles from the nearest person I’m sure there were other people closer than 6 miles from my various camp sites. I had a Jeep so everywhere I went was vehicle accessible (or at least, 4WD Jeep accessible). I doubt I was quite as isolated as I felt.
There are some people who have sailed across the Pacific Ocean solo. I dont know their exact routes but I’m sure some of those people probably hold the non-astronaut record for being the most isolated from another living person.
Hello! ::waves back::
I lived in Havre, or as one of my college students put it, “the big city.” She wasn’t joking–grew up on a ranch. We moved to Wyoming in 1990, so if you ever came into Havre to go to the mall or K-Mart when I happened to be there, maybe we crossed paths. 
Those routes are the same as those used by commercial shipping and airlines, though, which there is very little of around Antarctica.