I've been in at least a couple of the places in that list, and probably about as far from civilization as possible in those areas. I'm willing to believe their numbers are technically correct.
But I bet cityfolk have a reeeeeeaally different notion of "road" than is meant here.
Take the Trinity Alps complex for example. It's got, still to this day, my least favorite approach ever. You go way up the north coast, then along 299 (if I remember right), then through a reservation, and then you get on this lovely little road that's several miles of 15-mile-an-hour white-knuckle less-than-single-lane rough gravel, with steep granite on one side and a drop straight down to a river on t'other, and a whole lot of blind corners. You do that for a while, then you see the yellow sign posted that says, "Road Narrows", and whaddaya know, it sure as heck does.
It's a road that started as a trail and never really had any ambitions beyond that.
There are a ton of logging roads and fire cuts all over the place too. Lots of dusty hill climbs. Other rarely-trafficked routes where the macho advertising for your 4WD meets a grim reality.
Maps aren't necessarily current, either. I once bailed off the Wonderland Trail in Rainier after a partner took a bad fall. According to the map and the GPS, there was a road just a few miles out that led to a paved road that led to civilization. Great. Well, we get there, and after swimming through dense, wet vegetation for a while, start finally seeing signs that, yeah, there was a road there, about a hundred years ago.
18 miles as the bird flies can easily turn into two days' hiking in some of that terrain, too.
I live just north of Truckee. One day my GF had to go do some surveying over towards Nevada City. The easy way would have been out to 80, down to NC, and survey. Probably 2-2.5 hours of driving. I had the day free and said, "hey, lets try the back way -- via Downieville, Forest, Alleghany, etc. She said sure. That didn't work out so well.
Everything was going great, narrow roads crossing part of the Yuba River, gorgeous country, tight switchbacks and dangerous drops. Ended up on Foote Crossing Road, crossed the Yuba, climbed up a ways on a road maybe 2-3 wider than my Tacoma. Come around a corner, a chunk of slate had slid down covering the road days before. The options were backup 2+ miles or try and move the rock. Having a tow rope, we tried to move the large rock -- it moved, just not enough. After about 2.5 hours, a group came from the other direction and helped us out.
You have to be careful when out there. Before I do something like that again, despite thinking I was prepared, I'll do a bit more research and probably add a high lift jack and some other toys.
Howdy neighbor! I'm not far away. I really like the Meadow Lake and Old Man Mountain area.
It should be about 45 minutes flat from Truckee to Nevada City over 20. The road you took is a nice drive, but yeah, that intersection at Tyler Foote is no joke. If you take the wrong turn there, you'll end up like that woman that got stuck in mud for a few days in the middle of a storm 11 miles out in the middle of nowhere.
Howdy (former) neighbor! I'm guessing Sierraville or Loyalton?
Yeah, 49 is a fun drive for sure. Used to do it every once in awhile if I had to jump between visiting family in Loyalton and visiting family in Yuba City. Sometimes I'd even do it to/from home in Truckee (though the 80/20 route is definitely faster), especially if there's an unavoidable snowstorm and I expect Donner Pass to be closed (70 is a bit of an easier drive, but significantly longer).
Never ran into any rock slides, though. My grandma, on the other hand, narrowly missed a boulder that fell on 80 (somewhere between the Hirschdale Rd. and Floriston exits). Fun times.
Ah, gotcha! Yeah, those are... somewhat more treacherous, to say the least :) Haven't tried Foote Crossing specifically; maybe one of these days when I have a day to kill.
If you ever feel like exploring a bit further south (and if you haven't already), try driving around on the Long Valley / Dog Valley / Henness Pass roads. Really fun way to "commute" between Truckee/Loyalton/Verdi/Bordertown. Absolutely beautiful out there, too. Come similarly-prepared, though.
Yea that happened on the Foresthill/Georgetown side above the Rubicon River after the King fire a few years ago. A lot of washouts happened during the winters after the burn. It’s still pretty neat to explore and find stuff like that as long as you aren’t in a hurry.
FWIW Trinity Alps has some pavement-grade approaches as well, for instance you can get onto the PCT right off a fairly major road (Sawyers Bar, which is not bad for the area -- although to be fair you've described 299 as a bad drive, which I didn't find it to be, although it's two lane undivided highway for most of it and maybe city-folk aren't used to that). However forest roads are a given for most trailheads as you've described, at least in all the California wildernesses I've spent time in. I haven't taken the road you're describing, although it sounds a lot like a forest service road I ended up on to see the eclipse north-west of Bend, OR. That was fun. Also you should probably never take 101 up to Trinity Alps: take 5 up to Redding and then cut west on 299 instead of going up the coast and cutting east.
I enjoyed spotting all the places I've been in this fun guide, and the other thing I want to impress on people is that these "distance from road" measurements are crow-flies distance from the closest "road". You've done a good job describing how bad the road might be. People who have no experience with this kind of wilderness will have even less appreciation for how much work might be involved in actually getting to that the center point. It will _never_ be a 12 mile hike or whatever the distance they measure is. In many cases it's twice that, in some cases it's worse, and the trails (if there is one) are in some fairly steep terrain, so you can expect to do 15 miles on a strong day in good conditions.
I went looking for my favorite wilderness and was surprised not to find it, because I know how remote it is and Trinity Alps feels significantly smaller in comparison. In looking at it, I realized they've combined the contiguous region north of Yosemite Park as the "North Yosemite Complex", which includes Emigrant (my favorite), the northern part of Yosemite, etc. I was there for four days a week ago and after I got off the main trail I saw one person while I was hiking out. The rest of the time was spent off the trail and with no sign of another soul.
>
But I bet cityfolk have a reeeeeeaally different notion of "road" than is meant here.
Yes, they mean : no throughfare usable by a regular vehicle including high clearance 4wd, including private roads, tracks etc.
In the Absoroka here there are "inholdings" (I think they're the remnants of old mining claims) that the owners access via helicopter. There have been a few court cases about access over the years e.g. https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/lawsuit-seeks-to-build...
Small world. I remember reading your comment about vehicle fires on another thread recently, thinking "we _do_ have a lot of vehicle fires on the Interstate here, sounds like this person sees a similar high number where they live". Usually Subarus, no?
Even in the non-city-folk sense assuming that there are roads immediately adjacent to where the inscribed circle abuts wilderness boundaries seems unlikely. I'm sure the center points' actual distances from roads are often somewhat larger than the circles' radiuses.
Sounds about as friendly as the time I drove the Dalton Highway from Fairbanks, Alaska on a whim towards the Arctic Circle. Many times along the journey I was terrified that my 1996 Eagle Talon would get stuck in the gigantic mud ruts dug out by the maniac truckers that gleefully thundered by (apparently oblivious to the not-quite-cliffs only feet away).
I live in Texas now, which feels relatively tiny because you'll always find some sort of civilization (i.e. potable water) right around the corner. Granted, growing up in Alaska, my definition of "right around the corner" is probably a little different from those who were raised in the Lower 48.
You can get to the most remote area of the Trinity Alps pretty easily from the Bay Area. You head north and then eventually get on highway 3 and take that to Trinity Alps road. You drive maybe 10 miles and the there is Stuart Fork trailhead. The hike is probably 10-13 miles to get to the area shown in the map (though the scramble up to the actual most remote area would be tough). I went to Emerald and Sapphire lakes last year (near the most remote area) and it was pretty painless. Perhaps you were just approaching the alps from another area?
One of the most shocking facts about the lower 48 is that it's impossible to get more than 115 miles from a McDonalds.
That's not on a road - that's anywhere in the lower 48.
I always assume nearby a McDonald's would likely be a gas station.
Growing up in Australia and now living in the Yukon this blows my mind. I just drove 35,000 miles from Morocco to Cape Town in South Africa, and there were zero McDonalds that entire time. [1]
I've done a lot of expedition-style driving (can't stand the words "expedition" and "overlanding" as they are used today) and that straight line distance is very deceiving. I've been to many places that are many more that 115 road-miles from a McDonald's. A few places come to mind: deep in the southern part of the Owyhee Desert along the NV/ID border (one of the least-populated places in the Lower 48), and out in the Wah Wah Mountains [0] of southern Utah.
Part of why I love it is the pure awesomeness of the location: it commands a view over a large part of the UT/AZ border clear down to the Grand Canyon. It gets beautiful sunrises and sunsets and it's breezy but not wind-whipped. The camping is pretty bad if you sleep in a ground tent because of the deep sand but we slept in our trucks so it was fine.
The other thing that I love about the place was how I first found it. I was combing Google Maps satellite view in a SF hotel room late one night and found the almost-invisible track out to the edge of the cliff. A few nights later, I was there, driving it. I headed out to the spot alone, well after midnight. Camping alone is always a little freaky but camping at the end of a five mile dead-end trail was really spooky. The trail is super gnarly and overgrown. There are washouts and the last half-mile is in deep sand. I went to sleep that first night on the point not knowing what lay before me. I woke up the next morning and was stunned at the incredible view that I'd stumbled upon. It will always be among my favorites.
I love your instagram, and based on your description here it sounds like you're ready to head out far and wide!
I'll be back in the Yukon in ~18 months, it would be great to show you around.. and I highly recommend Alaska. After that you really should consider a run down to Argentina - it's simply stunning and totally achievable.
West Africa was like another planet entirely. I wild-camped like you describe virtually every day for an entire year - always in stunningly beautiful places down nasty tracks far away from other people. Now East Africa continues to impress each and every day!
I'd love to make it up to Alaska. I do most of my trips with a core group of friends that I've been traveling with for the last ten years or so. It's tough to coordinate schedules so we usually end up doing about 7 days together in the late spring. Given the distance involved with a Yukon trip, it just hasn't been feasible to get up there. We're thinking about a Baja trip but I would have to ship my truck to L.A. from Kansas because it just takes too long to get down there at 55 MPH.
Africa is a dream. I would have loved to have driven down the west coast before Mauritania got so dangerous. I once read a book called "My Mercedes is (not) For Sale" that got me hooked on the area. Suwame Magazine is a place that I want to see before I die.
> Given the distance involved with a Yukon trip, it just hasn't been feasible to get up there.
Get on the Alaska Marine Line ferry from Bellingham Washington up to Haines or Skagway, AK. In the off season it's cheaper and faster than driving, and you'll see tons of stuff you want to see - whales, eagles, glaciers, icebergs, etc. etc.
> I would have loved to have driven down the west coast before Mauritania got so dangerous.
Don't believe the hype. I personally met hundreds of people that drove it, and dozens that have driven it every year for 10+ years, and not a single person has ever had problems. Not even once. There are a lot of roadblocks where they check your paperwork - they're keeping everyone safe!
> My Mercedes is (not) For Sale
I read the same book to help build my stoke, loved it too!
That's an interesting phrase, "densely developed", because it's very much not the same thing as "densely populated". The African continent between Morocco and cape Town contains a hell of a lot more people than the lower 48 does.
Wow - what a drive! I just roughly clicked your path on Africa in Google Earth. It came up with 12,000 miles. So did the double mileage come from side treks, or is there that many switchbacks and turns to make things double when you are going overland?
A bit of both.
I imagine you could do Morocco to Cape Town in about 15,000 if you tried, but that would be skipping A LOT of countries and beautiful places.
18.7 miles is a long distance. If you're 18.7 miles from the closest motorized access point, you're in the middle of 1098 square miles of untouched land. Based on my memories of exploring the woods as a child, you could spend a full year getting to know the details of even a single square mile of natural landscape.
I think it's an interesting irony here that, primarily because of motor travel, we imagine that an 18.7-mile radius is not that substantial. (Yes, a marathon is more distance than that, but those are usually on paved roads and not through wilderness. The legend is that the first to run a marathon died of exhaustion on its completion.)
A square mile is referred to as a "section" in the parlance of the public land surveying system. That is also 640 acres. (260 hectares for those of you without acres)
I looked at buying 1,000 acres of wooded land in southern Colorado (at the time it was selling for $240/acre or just under .25M$ during the dot com days) It was part of a 60,000 acre sheep ranch that was being broken up. I could easily spending years exploring a parcel that size.
To be more complete "from roads, machines, and motors." I live in Idaho and know for a fact you can get further than 18.76 miles from a road. The addition of "machines and motors" brings motorized trails into scope and yeah, at that point I believe it.
I've been contemplating moving to Idaho. It is a beautiful place. I would like to find a part of Idaho that has low crime, has at least 30mb internet and ideally low maintenance land.
Very dissatisifed with the evidence in this article (only national parks?), so I did my own digging.
Here is a 2005 USGS map [1] color-coding nearest road distance for every 30m x 30m square [2] in the lower 48. Surprisingly, it seems to hold up the article's claim reasonably well, and without resorting to discussing 'machines' or 'motors'.
In the US, "Wilderness" has a specific meaning at the Federal level. "Machines and motors" is part of the wilderness designation. Wilderness designation prohibits chainsaws, snowmobiles, outboard motors, aircraft, and bicycles. Horses are allowed and owners of valubale Wilderness Area inholdings will use wagon trains to haul construction materials for their getaways.
This article (among others) suggests that the most remote from a road is a corner of Yellowstone where you can get about 20 miles away. [1] I sort of expected that the distance would be greater even accounting for the fact that many "roads" in the West aren't really what a lot of people would consider roads. I have also read some claims for a greater distance from a road, such as in the Wind Rivers, but I haven't seen anyone arguing for more than 30 miles or so.
[ADDED: The USGS map is really interesting although I wish they had given the "winner." It appears that there are a fair number of spots that cluster around about the 20 mile point. Some are in places you wouldn't necessarily expect although many of those are along a border which reduces the number of directions where a road could lie.]
Right, just to clarify, a "wilderness area" is similar to a national park in that it is land that is set aside by governmental decree, but most things are banned in a wilderness area, notably motor vehicles, whereas many national parks have all sorts of development.
The actual title of the article does not mention roads, probably because they "all motorized travel, including the legal use of motorboats on portions of Yellowstone Lake."
>So the remote Thorofare location and radius shown here will not match values calculated purely from the road network.
I grew up in very rural NM, and while you can find a road in some of these areas, I doubt you’ll see more than a few cars a month during peak times of the year.
Just because there’s a road doesn’t mean that it gets much use. Some are only used to haul animals, oil or timber a few times a year.
Some of them were only used a few times a year. I don't know exactly how remote you can get in NM but I know plenty of our marked roads go to mines that haven't been active in a century.
Interesting data set, but what I'd want to know is what is the farthest you can get from the farthest road.
This tells us that wherever we are, IFF we walk in one of the 2-3 the optimal headings for that circle, we'll hit a road in ~18 miles max. That's the best worst-case.
What about the worst worst case -- if we head in the most un-optimal direction? How effed are we in that circumstance?
Might not be the worst case and I may have missed a small logging road but if you were to head roughly south parallel to the John Muir Trail from around Tuolumne meadows it would be about 130-140 miles before you reach a road or US-395 around the Kennedy Meadows store. I think you can just miss the roads around Mammoth and Devil's postpile and then the Road's end trail head in SEKI.
Assume you are between any two civilization services and you simply walk parallel to both indefinitely... Seems that's about as bad as it can get. So I guess finding for the longest straight line anyone can take wuthout hitting anything that could rescue you is the answer to your question.
I just watched exactly that last weekend. Not even all that remote (Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness). Guy came down with appendicitis overnight, a 10mi hike in from the nearest road/trailhead.
He was fortunate enough to be able to get out to a major trail and someone with a PLB passed by and called it in, so they could get a helicopter out to him.
But had he been on a slightly less popular trail, he might not have had that luck, and it could easily have been 10 hours for someone to come across him and then speed hike out to a cell signal.
I actually find this rather upsetting. I'd always assumed if you went to the right places out west, you'd be able to get at least 50 miles or so from anything if you wanted to. It seems the west isn't quite as wild as I wanted it to be.
If you are willing to allow dirt roads in your definition of "getting away", you can get a hell of a long way from civilization in the western US.
A few places come to mind:
The Deep Creek Range of western Utah (simply stunning)
The North Rim of the Grand Canyon SSE of Hurricane, Utah. Not the popular tourist areas but the extremely remote canyon rim around SB Point.
The Toiyabe and Monitor Ranges of Central Nevada. Pick any valley in the Range-and-Basin country, drive halfway down it, and then head east or west into the mountains.
The Owyhee Desert. Google for Crutcher's Crossing.
I expect some of these roads haven't seen anyone (person or car) for years.
"Roads" don't really seem to die. Once they are mapped, they show up forevermore -- even if no-one is taking them and no-one is checking that they are still navigable.
The forest service, at least in some of the more "popular" areas in WA, CA and OR sometimes rates the road on their motor vehicle use map so you know the likelihood you'll actually be able to use it. On BLM land I've found map roads that there is little no evidence of at all.
Perhaps it is more "speaking" to give what that distance means in terms of area. A radius of 50 mi. would mean an area of approximately 7854 square mi. Doesn't that sound like a lot now?
In one of the places on this list, quite near the stated "most remote spot", the realization, "Whoa, we are considering bailing off this route because of poor/dangerous conditions, and the shortest bail is about two days' walk." was quite a revelation.
When terrain and conditions are challenging enough, a few miles' distance might as well be the distance to the moon, when it comes to isolation.
If that notion pulls at you, follow it, but take small and reversible steps.
I live in Mazama, Washington right on the edge of the Pasayten Wilderness (we can run from the house and be in the wilderness in a few trail miles). It is a massive, remote, beautiful place that even most people in Seattle have never heard of. There are downsides to living so remotely but the upsides far outweigh them.
From living in Eastern WA it seemed liked most of the Western WA people never crossed the mountains or knew that there even was another side. Don't tell anyone as we don't want too many to learn about it.
It looks like they limit the radius of wilderness to the US border. The circle for Boundary Waters would be bigger otherwise, since the Quetico (on Canada's side) is wilderness as well.
From the article: "Wilderness areas in Canada are not taken into account. There is no Canadian national wilderness designation program like there in the USA, and determining the boundaries of land with wilderness character in the various parks would be difficult. Three US wilderness complexes have inscribed circles constrained by the border with Canada, and a glance at aerial maps for the areas north of the Mount Baker and Pasyaten wilderness areas show what looks like roads and clear-cuts over the border. However, the Boundary Waters wilderness is next to the vast Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, which appears to be mostly primeval. So the radius for Boundary Waters could be as high as 13.6 miles if allowed to go over the border."
Just by looking at the first example you can actually "be more than 18.76 miles from a road" if you don't limit your radius by park boundaries. Probably 20-somthingish just eyeballing the first map without looking at other examples where (maybe) multiple parks share borders.
There's also the assumption that Wilderness Areas are automatically the furthest from roads, machines, and motors. That may be true but I don't automatically take that as automatically true given the size of some of the National Forests out west. It's probably true given the different rules governing Wilderness Areas vs. non-wilderness areas of forests. But I wouldn't make a big bet.
Their definition of wilderness area is quite broad and includes areas within national forests that are "de-facto" wildernesses:
> Four categories of Wilderness area were considered for this analysis:
> - Federal Wilderness Areas, designated by the 1964 Wilderness Act and subsequent congressional action. These are by far the best known and most numerous of the wilderness areas in the USA—there are about 750 of them, preserving federal land managed by the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management.
> - “De-facto” Wilderness Areas in National Parks: In most large National Parks (e.g. Olympic, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain), the bulk of the park’s backcountry has been officially designated as wilderness area. However, three large parks—Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Glacier—have large undeveloped tracts that are managed by park staff as wilderness despite lack of official designation. For this analysis, the large primitive areas of these parks have been included, since park regulations in these areas are essentially the same as in officially-designated areas.
> - State Wilderness Areas: In New York state (Adirondacks and Catskills) and Maine (Baxter State Park on Katahdin), large wilderness areas are managed by the State government. Large parts of these parks have been designated as official state wilderness areas and are managed in a similar fashion to federal wilderness.
> - Tribal Wilderness: Finally, a handful of large Indian Reservations have designated large areas as Tribal wilderness. Perhaps the two most notable are adjacent to federal wilderness in the Wind River Range of Wyoming and the Mission Mountains of Montana. These are included in the overall wilderness areas.
Yeah it really looks like their algorithm is not doing something so fancy as considering the forest roads which in theory are motorable (but may not have seen one in years), so much as measuring from drivable roads and park boundaries which are quite jagged, with significant amounts of park outside the drawn circle... I wonder how much larger the circles would be if you allowed for roughly 1 radian of the circumference to cross outside park boundaries
Yvon Chouinard mentions this in his excellent book “Let My People Go Surfing,” where he says the furthest you can get from a road in the lower 48 is about 20 miles, near the headwaters of the Snake River in Wyoming. Cool to see some methodology that lines up with that estimate.
It looks like you get 18.7 miles for the Thorofare area if you look at the boundaries of the wilderness area, not roads. For OSM data, specifically, the area is bigger than that: 21.7 miles. If yall want to play yourselves:
I saw the same thing for the only Adirondack entry on the list; there's on spot that is technically private property surrounded by wilderness that probably drops the distance in half. Sure somebody could put a road there, but the effort would be insane.
The important thing to know is what the heading should be to that road, when you’re lost. Knowing one is no more than 17miles from you max, when under weather stress, does little good and offers little comfort.
That is very true. When I read the title it immediately brought to mind the 2006 events of James Kim disappearance and death. Although I'm on the other side of the planet and didn't know him or ever followed his TV show, the then news of him and his family being lost in the wild got my attention until the sad ending.
If you're lost, please stop moving and re-assess. If you have a cell signal, make a call for help (911 is just fine). If you don't, hopefully you brought a PLB. Go ahead and use it. If you can't make a call or use a PLB, then get out your GPS and start following your track back the way you came (almost always better than venturing deeper into the unknown just because there's supposed to be a road up ahead). If you also don't have a GPS, then get out your map and start figuring out how to go back the way you came in. If you don't have a map ... what the heck are you doing, anyway?
There are quite a few places where trying to follow water downstream, or even powerlines, will get you even deeper into trouble.
In most areas, people wait too long to ask for help, and they can make their situation worse by trying to self-rescue. In most counties that have wilderness areas, there's a county search and rescue team, all volunteers, who are familiar with the area and will be perfectly happy to come and get you at no cost. That comes with the added benefit that you'll get to meet some cool folks, and if you suddenly get sick or injured or something else goes wrong, people with first aid training will be right there.
SAR teaches kids, "if you're lost, hug a tree" for good reason.
Things are very situational dependent. If you're reading this on hacker news I'm /assuming/ my intended audience is an adult, probably intelligent enough to not intentionally wind up somewhere bad, but has found themselves there anyway.
If that happened they might not have a (working) phone and might also not have anything else but their whits.
Kids, usually, have a parent or guardian that expects to know where they are, so search and rescue is a reasonable expectation and staying near where you were last known to be is the best policy.
Adults aren't likely to be missed for hours or days. While I am not an expert it is my logical belief that reaching a situation where help resources can be summoned is a better policy, and further, that the above steps are also the most logical expansion routes FOR a search zone.
The approach when educating kids is a bit different, but the message is the same: once a person finds themselves in a bad situation, the preference is to stay put and ask for help, if possible.
> the above steps are also the most logical expansion routes FOR a search zone.
It doesn't really work like that. Although there are books on the subject (Lost Person Behavior) and some other efforts to figure out behavior statistically, and local SAR managers will have some hunches based on experience, nobody can entirely get into the head of a missing person and judge with any certainty whether one direction or another is better during a search.
Search managers are well aware that "follow water downhill" is common advice going back to the boy scouts, but when a missing person inevitably encounters some obstacle along the way, they deviate from that plan. The search area gets big really quickly, and SAR teams are a limited resource. It's way better to respond to coordinates from a phone call or a PLB than it is to spend days with a lot of boots on the ground.
> nobody can entirely get into the head of a missing person and judge with any certainty whether one direction or another is better during a search.
Let's say a group gets separated during a hike, and Bob goes missing. No one noticed for a little while. Bob doesn't have a map but is fairly capable in the outdoors.
Your group sends a couple people back to the last place he was seen. It's a nice straightforward search area. Bob isn't there. Now we need to widen the search area.
Bob might have followed a steam - and in the couple of hours it took to get back to where he was last seen, he may have gone a couple miles.
Or he might have tried to get to a high point to look around. The nearest likely hill is a mile away, but there's another option in the other direction.
Or maybe Bob retraced his steps and is headed back on the trail you all came in on together.
All of a sudden your search area is 15 square miles, and with each potential decision with every passing hour, it gets wider.
You could put complete trust in his abilities and just wait for him to self rescue, but what if he gets hurt? What if he doesn't show up in a couple days?
Wouldn't it have been great if Bob had hugged a tree?
> will be perfectly happy to come and get you at no cost.
There is a cost. If you were lost or injured due to negligence, they may charge you for it. Even if they don't charge you, rescues cost money. Some states have cheap insurance policies you can buy (in the range of a few bucks a year), which go towards the costs of search and rescue, but one way or another, money is spent. More than one might expect.
It is also not a way to "meet some cool folks". Needing a rescue is not something to be taken lightly. Not all rescues succeed, and people die in the wilderness every year, despite large rescue efforts when they go missing. Be safe. SAR may be a safety net, but don't take that for granted.
I don't recall any credible cases where someone was charged by a search and rescue organization. Some other organizations might (AMR has recently started showing up at calls and charging for the kind of basic first aid that SAR traditionally has provided for free), but in general it's SAR policy not to charge even when the person involved made some really bone-headed decisions.
If you get air-ambulanced, yes, you'll probably end up with a hefty bill for that and your insurance company probably has a clause exempting them from paying it. REACH (https://reachair.com/membership/) and AirMedCare (https://www.airmedcarenetwork.com/) both provide affordable insurance for this.
But if it's CHP or air national guard that picks you up, you shouldn't expect to get a bill for it.
Pilots need flight hours and ground SAR personnel need regular training. There are a handful of areas where SAR might get a bit over-worked now and again, but usually more calls are better than no calls. Yes, the rescues incur some cost, but a significant amount of that cost is covered by the SAR volunteers themselves.
And yes, it is a way to "meet some cool folks". Obviously I don't mean go out and call for a rescue if you don't need one, but talk to any SAR volunteer and they'll almost universally say the same thing: they'd rather people call sooner than later, and they're happy to walk out with them.
The call-outs that get really expensive are the ones where somebody disappears and SAR has got no damn clue where they went. Those can stretch on for several days before the search is suspended, can consume multiple air resources, and increases the risk of injury for volunteers. In many of those cases, the search would've ended successfully far earlier if someone involved had called as soon as they thought there was trouble.
New Hampshire is one of the ones that bills, yes. Over 70K in bills over the last 10 years. They aren't the only state that does it. I'm glad you are in CA where it is free, but that is not universal. It has been a hot topic of discussion for years, but there is no universal answer, and people have been billed. Yes, the culture is that people want to help, and that it should be free, but the entire reason that some state laws allow billing, as well as the reason for insurance plans to exist, is because there is a cost which needs to be paid.
Your original comment was not obvious in its intent to say that SAR folks are cool. It sounded like a superficial recommendation to go out and be safe, and to call SAR early and often because they are a free and 100% reliable safety net. You clearly know enough to know that isn't true.
So NH has billed a whopping $7,000 a year over the past 10 years. Yes, they charge in some cases--there was a weird recent one where they took a donation in lieu of billing someone. But these cases are ones that make the newspapers. It's not at all common.
New Hampshire is not just "one of the ones that bills", they are very nearly the only one that charges for rescues. A few other states have passed laws allowing them to charge for rescues, but they rarely or don't at all act on it, and a few popular areas with very small tax bases charge for rescues but they too are exceptions. [1] This is the definition of "the exception that proves the rule".
By contrast, the attitude at the statewide SAR conferences I've attended, and from SAR volunteers I've talked to across the country and in Canada, and from official statements from the National Association for Search And Rescue, and other agencies, are all opposed to charging people for rescues, and for good reasons.
Like the official statement from the national Mountain Rescue Association says: "...no one should ever be made to feel they must delay in notifying the proper authorities of a search or rescue incident out of fear of possible charges. We ask all outdoors groups and organizations to join us in sending this mountain safety education message." [2]
And as the former president of the Colorado Search and Rescue board says, "...people, fearing costs, have refused rescue despite grim injuries: a climber who hobbled down a 3,000-ft. mountain with a broken ankle; a woman who set out on her own to locate her missing husband; a lost and bewildered runner who hid from rescue crews. 'We know that when people believe that they are going to receive a large bill for a SAR mission, they delay a call for help or they refuse to call for help'". [3]
One of the most frustrating messages we have to continually get out to the public is that it's okay to call for search and rescue and that they should not expect to be charged for it. Every hour that someone is lost or endangered and delays calling for rescue adds to the size and complexity of the operation. We want search operations to be small, easy, and fast, and the only way for that to happen is for people to call sooner rather than later. New Hampshire's policy is screwing with that messaging and fuck them for that.
I would also refuse to volunteer my expertise to any agency that charges people for being rescued. If the agency's gonna collect, I expect to get my cut too. I volunteer to keep it free for the subjects of the search.
The attitude that people should pay for rescues tends to come from the same people that are quick to forget their own mishaps and quicker still to criticize others from the safety of their own spotless decision-making. There's at least a couple of these people that show up to every fundraiser or other public event to say, "maybe you shouldn't rescue people that made bad decisions." I really don't respect those folks.
There are already a lot of public safety services that do not directly charge the people involved in the incidents they respond to. This is a debate the country has already had and settled: you generally don't get charged for calling police or fire. New Hampshire ought to consider applying their charge-for-response approach to those agencies too and see how that works out for 'em.
> Your original comment was not obvious in its intent to say that SAR folks are cool. It sounded like a superficial recommendation to go out and be safe, and to call SAR early and often because they are a free and 100% reliable safety net. You clearly know enough to know that isn't true.
Yes, SAR folks are cool -- I mean in that most of them are friendly, capable, and professional, and want people to get home in good condition.
But the rest of your interpretation is fine too. I do in fact recommend that people go out (and have fun) and be safe, and call SAR early and often, because it should be free, and because it's a more reliable safety net when the calls come in earlier instead of later.
You may view that as "superficial", if you want, but I put a significant amount of my own time and money into making it true.
There's a single highway that connects it to the rest of the country, and it's 550km to the nearest major city. That highway doesn't actually run to the town though; in the winter there's an ice road, and in the summer there's a ferry from the west side of the lake.
If you're stranded in the bush near there, you're pretty much hoping that you can signal an aircraft that can land on the lake and pick you up. My guess is that the SaskPower repair/rescue crew probably came in via helicopter. I'm going to spend a few minutes here looking at the satellite view to try to find the power line (I can almost guarantee that it's a single one that links Wollaston Lake and Hatchet lake)
Edit: didn't find the power line, but did find confirmation that the repair was helicopter:
> "We have to charter a helicopter to fly the line to find out what the issue is and that's what we did on Friday. We discovered the four poles that were toppled and discovered him as well."
> The man had been out on the lake in a boat when bad weather struck. His rather dire circumstances may save him from the financial consequences of his unorthodox rescue signal -- which could cost the utility upwards of $100,000 to repair.
It's also worth noting that Saskatchewan is not very populated in general, either. There are 1.2M people, in an area 1.5x the size of California (which has 39.5M). At least 500K of those are way south of Wollaston, in Regina and Saskatoon.
There is no one around when you're up that far north. You're not getting overflights the way you might in the US. There are 3 flights (~30 max passengers each) daily to CZWL (Wollaston) by one SK airline - there's one other airline that might service it, not sure. There might be a few other small aircraft, but in an area with about 1k people, not many. So, yeah - you are not getting rescued without being lucky, and/or taking drastic measures.
Really, though, that's true once you leave the 49th parallel. In general, you get about half way up through the provinces in Canada, and there is nothing much left to go find.
Not quite true in northwest BC and all of AB are exceptions, AB due to oil, BC may be the same and/or mining. Then you have to get up into the territories.
You sound like you're around here :). I'm in Regina. If you're nearby and want to grab coffee, my email's in my profile. There aren't too many SK HNers...
Alas, no, I'm a Vancouverite. I just travel north a bit here and there, and to the prairies on occasion. You pick things up, and, well, there's not a huge amount of difference (in density at least) between northwest BC and northern SK/MB, so a lot of the same points apply.
And of course, there's always google for the numbers when I (somewhat inevitably) forget them.
You gotta be careful with that. You may end up causing major damage infrastructure and potentially lead to fatalities. Creating smoke in an area where the probability of causing a forest fire is negligible is one thing, but purposely starting a forest fire is extremely dangerous and illegal.
Equaling remoteness with being a designated wilderness is not the best way to find the most remote spots. Get on Tarantula Mesa or Upper Stevens Canyon in Utah. It is not a wilderness, but a National Monument (the one shrunk by the orange piece of shit in white house, btw), but these places are exceptionally remote. Certainly more remote than Thorofare in Yellowstone.
This is awesome! I've been near a few of these spots. However, some, at least, of their data is out of date.
For the Adirondack High Peaks complex, much of the Tahawus Tract, which bounds the circle on the southeast side, has been officially part of the wilderness area for five or so years now. I used to work at the main visitor's center in the area, and now work remote from about two miles from the northern edge of the complex. I'd say that adds roughly a mile to the radius here, but it could be a little less.
Also, in the near future, the bounds of the complex will change drastically at the southeast edge. The Boreas Ponds tract has been acquired by the state, and while it hasn't yet been officially designated as wilderness, when it is, it will connect the High Peaks to the Dix Mountain Wilderness, making the overall complex -- already the largest in the northeast -- something like 20% larger. But it won't stop it being a crazy shape.
Panhandle Lake is NOT the most remote place in the Boundary Waters. Not by any stretch. A clay foot algorithm.
I’ve had 100 square miles alone to myself in the BWCA for days/weeks and know the park well.
Since the BWCA is adjacent to the Quetico (on the Canadian side of the border), the concept of remote skews much further north. Time of year is also “remote” ... late October/early November is beautiful, if you don’t get “iced-in” for winter and can neither canoe nor walk out.
A relatively remote lake is Lake Kiana, where I’ve been between two simultaneous wolf packs (100 yds and 150 yards away in opposite directions). BWCA is where Yellowstone re-populated its wolves from. That close to 20-25 wolves chasing deer in the deep of night ... you listen for the “yip, yip, yip” of the pups trying to learn and keep up.
>where nature reigns supreme and no powered travel is permitted.
Except for airplanes and helicopters of course. There are no airspace restrictions preventing you from flying over these locations and I know people who have landed both planes and helicopters in these regions (although likely illegally).
You can fly over but you can't land. I'm not sure what the rule is about jumping out of the helicopter hovering a few feet above. Clearly against the spirit of the designated wilderness.
Planes are in fact really common sight over many of the Sierra Nevada wilderness as east coast to west coast transcontinental flight paths go right over the area, its a constant reminder you aren't really that far away. Some of the wilderness along the CA coast feel quite remote as you see almost no planes passing over you.
Fun trivia: at the highest vehicle accessible road in WA state (Slate Peak radar site), I have seen people get all the way to the top in a 1995 Toyota Corolla. The road to get there is not so terrible. There are many truly gnarly logging roads and things that will require a serious lifted 4x4 in first gear with AT tires. But all those are at lower elevation.
I live close to the top few locations in the list, although I've not yet had sufficient spare time to actually hike 20 miles off-road. But another interesting thing about this area is how far it is from a "proper city". e.g. 8h drive to Salt Lake or Calgary. 11h to Denver and Seattle. I'm not aware of any place in the lower 48 that's so far from metropolitian living. e.g. the next place down the list : Sierra Nevada. If you lived in a town nearby, say Mariposa : you're only 4h from San Francisco (assuming 580 is only moderately stationary).
>>> The radius in miles shows how large a circle can be fit into each area, and how remote each point is.
That distance is rather meaningless on the ground. Terrain matters. A big wall climber can be only a few hundred meters from a road on a map but still days away. On foot, 18 miles of Idaho pasture is much smaller than 3 miles of Florida swampland.
I expect that there are parts of Lake Michigan that are more than 18 miles from the nearest road.
Weyerhaeuser owns something in the neighborhood of 12 million acres of timberland in the US, though I don't know what their largest contiguous parcel is. They are probably the largest private landowner in the US (corporate, not individual).
Nope, the [park tote] road at 46.011344, -69.061875 is within the "remote radius" at peakbagger by about 450-500m. It's still in the top-50, but it's a tad lower on the list.
We've updated the title from “In the contiguous US, you can never be more than 18.76 miles from a road”, which breaks the submission guideline that asks for the original.
...though the original headline is itself incorrect. The analysis excludes Alaska.
"Most Remote Spots in USA Wilderness Complexes" should read "Most Remote spots in the Wilderness Complexes of the US Lower 48"
From the article's fine print:
> Alaska is excluded from this analysis, since the scale and character of wilderness there is simply very different than in the “Lower 48”. If Alaska wilderness areas were part of this project, the most remote spot would be in the middle of the Mollie Beattie Wilderness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the eastern Brooks Range, with an inscribed circle radius of 42.75 miles. Ironically, however, rules for wilderness in Alaska are different, and airplane landings are permitted in most areas. So in some ways you are more remote in the Thorfare area of Wyoming.
But I bet cityfolk have a reeeeeeaally different notion of "road" than is meant here.
Take the Trinity Alps complex for example. It's got, still to this day, my least favorite approach ever. You go way up the north coast, then along 299 (if I remember right), then through a reservation, and then you get on this lovely little road that's several miles of 15-mile-an-hour white-knuckle less-than-single-lane rough gravel, with steep granite on one side and a drop straight down to a river on t'other, and a whole lot of blind corners. You do that for a while, then you see the yellow sign posted that says, "Road Narrows", and whaddaya know, it sure as heck does.
It's a road that started as a trail and never really had any ambitions beyond that.
There are a ton of logging roads and fire cuts all over the place too. Lots of dusty hill climbs. Other rarely-trafficked routes where the macho advertising for your 4WD meets a grim reality.
Maps aren't necessarily current, either. I once bailed off the Wonderland Trail in Rainier after a partner took a bad fall. According to the map and the GPS, there was a road just a few miles out that led to a paved road that led to civilization. Great. Well, we get there, and after swimming through dense, wet vegetation for a while, start finally seeing signs that, yeah, there was a road there, about a hundred years ago.
18 miles as the bird flies can easily turn into two days' hiking in some of that terrain, too.