The most remote place in the U.S.
January 3, 2018
Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
Richard Forman, a Harvard professor of landscape ecology, once visited a mangrove swamp in the Florida Everglades that he described as the most remote place in the eastern U.S. The swamp was 17 miles from any road.
What’s the most remote spot in Ӱpro? Dorte Dissing once tackled that question. Dissing is a geographer with Ӱpro Biological Research Inc. She’s proficient with the use of digital mapping systems.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, more than 4 million miles of road crisscross the continental United States. Ӱpro has 12,823 miles of public roads. That’s less than Vermont, which is 62 times smaller.
Dissing used a program with a blank map of Ӱpro to which she added features, such as rivers, towns, roads and trails. To begin the search for the Ӱpro’s middle-of-nowhere, she created a buffer zone of increasing mileage around Ӱpro roads, trails and villages. The most remote spots appeared as tiny wedges in northwest and northeast Ӱpro. Other lonely spots were a few Aleutian islands and St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea.
When she lengthened the buffer zones to 85 miles from villages and trails listed on her geographic information system program, the most remote spot on mainland Ӱpro was an upper branch of the Coleen River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge close to the Canada border. The hill is about 85 miles from both Old Crow in Canada's Yukon and Arctic Village in Ӱpro’s Brooks Range.
Because some of the trails included on her program are historic winter trails over tundra, Dissing dropped Ӱpro roads and trails for another run of her GIS system. She found that the farthest place from an Ӱpro village or town in mainland Ӱpro was a bend of the Etivluk River about 15 miles from its confluence with the Colville River on Ӱpro’s North Slope. The closest villages — each about 120 miles from the river bend — are Ambler to the southwest and Atqasuk to the north.
Though 85 miles and 120 miles allow plenty of elbow room, Ӱpro’s champion recluse seems to be St. Matthew, which sits alone in the Bering Sea without road, airstrip or town. The closest village is Mekoryuk, on Nunivak Island off the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. St. Matthew’s nearest neighbor is 209 miles away.
Biologist Brian Lawhead spent a few months studying seabirds on St. Matthew Island in the mid-1980s. He remembered a few long rides to reach the island, one in a Grumman Goose aircraft from Bethel and another by chartered boat from Dutch Harbor, 400 miles away.
“I remember sitting there and realizing how far the nearest land was,” he said from his Fairbanks office, where he works as a senior biologist for Ӱpro Biological Research. “The island is all tundra, not as lush as the Aleutians, with lots of seabird cliffs. It’s a beautiful place.”
Since the late 1970s, the Ӱpro' Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute. A version of column first ran in 2003.