Where Exactly Is The Middle Of Nowhere?

We’ve all said it or thought it or joked about it or believed it at one point in our lives. That damn, we were in the middle of nowhere. But that dark stretch of highway hardly qualifies as nowhere. True nowhere is actually in Idaho.

Visual Statistix created this wonderful map of the United States that actually pinpoints where the middle of nowhere is by both land and air. For the land map (which is above), Visual Statistix analysed where all the major US roads are (interstate routes, highways, large roads, etc.). The air map was made with all the airports in the US. Visual Statistix explains the process:

The GIS measures the Euclidean distance within the map projection from every cell, as defined by the raster resolution (~500 meters), to the closest feature in the shapefile (database). The resulting maps have been scaled to show when you are close to a feature (somewhere) in blue, and when you are far away (nowhere) in red.

It’s definitely a clever method to use to figure things out. So where’s the real middle of nowhere (at least as far as the US is concerned)? With these guidelines, it’s usually something that involves a giant mass of mother nature. Idaho’s National Forest, Arizona’s Grand Canyon, lakes in Maine all appear as nowhere. Apparently so does the intersection of Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. As for the middle of nowhere by air, that would be patches of Nevada and Wyoming. So I guess Nevada is the winner?

Read more about the fascinating report at Visual Statistix. [Visual Statistix via Maps on the Web]