I’ve been browsing sites about the US’s remote wildlife refuges in the Pacific. There’s something deeply satisfying about a place like Baker Island, which only sees human visitors about once every two years. I almost want to get a boat and head out to such faraway places as Baker, Howland, Jarvis, Johnston, Palmyra, Wake, the traffic jam that is the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.
I never will. I can’t sail. It’s way too far. It’s highly illegal. So I must go without seeing Earhart Light on Howland Island (ironically, it’s now a day beacon and Earhart never saw it.) I’ll never tour Millerville, Jarvis Island, which is “usually uninhabited” according to the CIA fact book map. I’ll never lay flowers at Wake Island’s “98 US PW 5-10-43” marker, the lone survivor’s chronicle of a Japanese war atrocity before he too was killed. I’ll never marvel at flocks of unafraid boobies and frigatebirds and untouched coral reefs. Just as well. If I could get there, it’d be just another tourist spot.
I want to someplace distant, where few people go. I’ve thought about the places I’ve been and I’m a little surprised to say that my own home state has one of the loneliest stretches I’ve ever visited. Western Oklahoma has few people and few features. I had to spend three days there for an agency conference, boring as hell, but at night all I had to do was ditch my drunk coworkers after dark, step outside, and look at all the stars you can’t see in the rest of the state. The Milky Way is still there, gleaming faint and washed out, and you can hear raccoons foraging nearby. Only California on the wrong side of the Sierra Nevadas seemed as far away as Lone Wolf, OK, just a hundred miles or so from my home.
The most distant place I’ve been, from where I was born and subsequently raised, was not at all unpopulated. Yokosuka, Japan, when I was a wee’un.
I’ve often thought about going away. I’m fairly solitary anyway, so what difference would it make? I could be Robinson Crusoe and swim in clear waters. I think it would be neat to emulate Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki journey. A hundred-and-one days on a raft, and then a deserted atoll. That sounds like fun.
I’m not sure what you’re asking here. The most distant place I’ve ever been from where I was born was probably San Antonio, Texas. But the most remote place I’ve ever been was probably fairly close to where I was born in the northern Adirondacks - I’ve been on camping trips that required a couple days of canoe travel from the end of the road.
Florida is the furthest place I’ve been from my place of birth and current home.
How sad is that?
I’m going to a foreign country tomorrow and it’ll be closer than Florida. I am woefully un-traveled. Unless you count the SW United States.
As far as least populated though I once went horseback camping in Colorado’s Weminuche Wilderness. And there were still a lot of damn people (it was deer season and the outfitters and their clients were there, as far as the eye could see…).
Me, I want to retire to a hut in Tierra Del Fuego.
Pointe du Raz, the most westerly point on mainland France
and
Hermaness, the most northerly point on Unst, the most northerly (inhabited) bit of the United Kingdom. The island also houses the UK’s most northerly brewery, Valhalla, and the most northerly pub, the Baltasound Hotel.
I could say Timbuktu, Mali, but one is able to fly there. So it would have to be another locale in Mali called “Bandiagara” (scroll down). This is a very old animist Dogon region where the people live much as they did 800 years ago. They used to be cliff dwellers, but the villages now rest at the base and top of the cliffs. The dead are buried high in the cliff walls. To get there, we drove from Bamako up to Mopti where we hired a desert guide to take us four-wheeling through dry washes, sand and fallow fields to the cliff area. It’s quite remote.
Last year we drove up to Prudhoe Bay, which is the northern tip of the US, but in terms of remoteness, it’s pretty accessible now.
I’m from Southern Ontario. The furthest away I’ve been from there is Vancouver and Los Angeles, on the other side of the continent, and now Florida on this one. I haven’t been further south than Orlando.
But the most remote place I’ve ever been was standing on the highway between Regina and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with nothing but prairie to the horizon in every direction. No civilization for dozens of miles.
The furthest I’ve been from where I was born was either on a ship off the coast of Portugal, or near the midpoint of the flight I took earlier this year from London Heathrow to Washington Dulles. The furthest I’ve been while standing on dry land was the time I visited Newquay in Cornwall.
The furthest I’ve been from where I live now would be on a ship off the southwest corner of Western Australia. The furthest on dry land would be Fremantle in Wedstern Australia.
(In case you hadn’t worked it out, the precise antipodes are in the North Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, respectively, a long way from dry land).
Furthest from hoem was Italy, but msot remote is either the wilderness of New Mexico (which, BTW, is full of bears that love to take a swipe at your tentmate’s face while you’re both sleeping in it) or Baxter State Park in Maine.
The furthest away from home that I’ve been is Buenos Aires. The most remote location that I’ve been to is the Andean Northwest of Argentina. I’d love to go back.
Easternmost: Helsinki, Finland
Northernmost: Edmonton, AB
Westernmost: Tofino, BC
Southernmost: either Virginia Beach, VA, or Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, CA (halfway between San Francisco and LA on the coastal highway).
Most remote? Hard to say. It’s probably somewhere in Algonquin Park or near Banff, although the highway that crosses the US border in the SE corner of Alberta qualifies for prairie remoteness as well…
Noplace exotic, although I’d love to go someplace truly off the beaten path. Furthest north was Arbroath, Scotland (during the winter solstice, no less – it got dark at 3). Furthest South is Aruba. East and West were in the middle of highly populated cities.
I think the farthest I’ve gotten from well-populated sites was out in the Utah desert – I’ve been all over the state, and some places you think there’s no one else for dozens of miles in any direction.
There’s an island off the north coast of Haiti called Tortuga. Only poor Haitians live there in grass huts. I spent some time there as a kid when Dad and some others started to develop the island. We brought the first internal combustion engines to the island and I was told I was the first white kid there since the days of pirate ships. Baby Doc Duvallier and his ministers got greedy though and shut down our efforts when we refused to pay bribes and as far as I know Tortuga’s still in it’s exceedingly primitive status.
I’ve landed via helicopter on Spy Island, an unhabitated patch of sand in the Arctic north of the DEW line and even on sea ice further out in the ocean. That was pretty freakin’ remote.
Also spent a week in the Yukon-Charlie wilderness near the Alaska/Canada border. It was 80 miles by chopper every day from the nearest town and not a soul to be seen. I kinda liked that.
I was raised in PA USA and I would say that Osaka Japan is the most distant place that I have been. Japan is a beautiful country and I loved it there. I would go again in a heart beat given the chance.
