Not to mention Slab City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_City,_California
Infrastructure-wise, roads come before water or electricity, and so plenty of the United States has a road but no power or water. This can even be standard for those who are near civilization.
Remote is somewhere like Nullarbor, which is 183 miles from Ceduna (population < 6000). It's over 1000km to Adelaide (population 1.3m) or 1600km to Perth (population 1.9m).
My sister lived in Wingellina[1][2], Western Australia which was a 6 hour drive on unpaved, 4WD required track from Alice Springs. That's close to one of the most difficult, isolated places to get to in Australia, but even there isn't a week on Camels. Maybe going further west into the Great Sandy Desert might get close (although you get close to small townships in WA if you go too far).
The Empty Quarter has low population density but is smaller than isolated areas in Australia.
There are probably places in Siberia and Canada that are fairly isolated too.
I agree that there are more isolated islands. The Pitcairn Islands is the most obvious case.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/Q2wL9KCa9aXht3YS9
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingellina,_Western_Australia
But a good example of remote is Nulato, Alaska.
Point is, yes USA is huge (let alone Australia) and skews our sense of distance, but 100 miles is not as trivial distance as we sometimes instinctively feel :-)
I can leave Denver and be DEEP into Wyoming in 2 hours, or it can take 90 minutes to go 60 miles in Rural Virginia (80mph speed limit vs 60 mph speed limit)
If your vehicle breaks down, how screwed are you?
Do you have cell coverage to call for help?
Will anyone be passing by to flag down, any time soon?
How far away is the nearest LEO agency, fire department, ambulance?
How far away is the nearest place for water, food, etc?
I know you didn’t mean Low Earth Orbit agency, but the thought is funny.
If you’re not more than 1000+ km from the nearest satellite, you’re not in a remote area!
Some people just love not having people around, in which case you really want low average weekly population density within say 5-10km (out of easy visibility and hearing).
Some people are concerned about civilization collapse or civil war or... something (ie, the prepper type). In that case you can imagine population dispersing away from (and possibly towards) major population centers over a period of months, and you want true isolation.
Another factor of this living is that once the honeymoon period wears off, there is a dawning on many people that their tolerance for failure has dropped significantly. A break down of a vehicle can become a very big issue very fast when the nearest town is an hour away.
I'm not looking for a forever home. I figure I might live in the middle of nowhere for a decade or so and then who knows. Maybe move closer to town and have a nice place to visit part of the year.
Canada is vast and in some places very rugged. "Remote" and "northern" are not related terms. Just look at BC on google maps. Look at the bit of vancouver island that is south of the US border. That is some very remote terrain, but is no way northern. Then scan up into the BC coast. Just a few hundred miles from downtown Vancouver and not a single road to be found. Or start at Whistler and pan west. Hundred of miles of mountains with nothing more than the occasional logging road.
There are many interpretations and levels of remoteness.
In my case, I want to be away from the sights and sounds and crowds of anything that would be considered urban or suburban. My prime criteria is that I don't want to see another person unless I choose to. I don't want to see a road with cars on it, I don't want to see another house or any other man-made structure that isn't mine. Ideally I don't want to hear anyone else either, but I accept that I may hear things in the distance.
I don't want to be a complete hermit, and I'm not a survivalist looking to be 100% self-sufficient. I want a small-to-midsized town about 30-60 minutes away. Something with a grocery store, gas station, and a post office or other place to receive deliveries. I don't want to be more than an hour away from doctors' offices or a hospital or urgent care. I don't want to be trapped by snow for weeks at a time.
Saying "far from civilization" was a stretch. What I really mean is I don't want to have people all around me. And I don't want to be anywhere near cities and suburban sprawl. I don't want neighbors in any meaningful sense.
Places I'm considering are Maine, Montana, northern Wisconsin, Upper Peninsula Michigan. I would absolutely consider parts of Canada, particularly northern BC. I don't have an easy path to Canadian citizenship, though. Before my Canadian girlfriend passed away last year, we had been planning to look for a secluded lakeside cabin or undeveloped land in BC.
My requirements are dense forest (desert/plains states are right out) and water (lake or canoeable river) on the property itself. I can live with other people using the water, so long as it's not motorboats and a party scene.
It would be boring if we were all like me and clumped together.
I lived in midtown Manhattan and I loved being able to go out at 3am in the middle of the winter and find a fresh produce stand on the corner outside my apartment, get falafel wraps and Ethiopian and Thai and sushi and all the other great food during my lunch break, and have museums and concerts and Broadway shows within walking distance.
I lived in the Cayman Islands and had a roommate, could walk to the beach and to my favorite bars, my house was the primary hangout spot for all my friends. I was socializing daily there, and it was a small community where I knew just about everyone everywhere I went.
I'm old now. I don't drink anymore. I have no interest in parties. Even when I live in or near a city, I don't take advantage of much of anything it has to offer. I'm sick of the noise and filth and crowds, the crime and homelessness, the lack of privacy that comes with urban living. All my friends are older, have kids, live in the suburbs and are scattered all over the country. The eight months of the year that I'm not on the road in my RV, I'm living in a cookie-cutter suburban house and have no local friends at all. I exchange pleasantries with the neighbors.
My entire social life is online now, and when I can, I'm traveling. I want maximum peace and quiet. I'll go visit friends and family every couple months if I want to socialize. If/when I do settle down at my far-from-civilization objective, I may very well start feeling lonely and seek out social clubs or social hobbies. But I'll be glad to have my seclusion to return to.
Lots of remote forested areas in Georgia and Alabama, but I can also understand opposition to the heat.
I would give a lot consideration to TN and NC mountains.
I still plan to spend much of the year traveling in an RV even after I settle somewhere. I'd be happy to spend the winter holed up in a cabin with a wood stove though.
Coming back to NJ, a neighbor mentioned that they are still fighting the civil war in the south, which the media seems to also resonate well.
Just a based view from a NJ resident
Warmer humid climates, it’s common to only get (at most) a few months of ‘no bugs’.
Chiggers, ticks, noseeums, mosquitos, black flies, etc.
Also, warmer humid environment mosquitos are usually tiny, sneaky, and disease carrying.
Cold area mosquitos tend to be huge, obnoxious, and less disease carrying. Easier to kill, but will bite through thick sweatshirts, type thing. (Yes really!)
Or go southwest US and only have the occasional horsefly to worry about.
I'd rather have people I trust a bit around me than privacy, in general. For sure people there help each other out when help is needed. It just feels to be a more resilient, robust to errors kind of society than me and my stuff out there.
Now I'm living in San Jose, but I've passed the 8 year mark in my current location and in fact am accumulating connections with the people on the block and nearby. I go to stores where the workers stay year after year, so I am familiar to people. I've started going to classes at a local university. It's still not the connected feel of a small East coast town (Californians do seem to like their fences around the backyard and not to appreciate comments on their personal decisions), but pleasant. If only there was a grocery store I could walk to.
I also recommend finding a town that caters to rich tech people who want to live this remote fantasy, there are quite a few of them. It's so much more enjoyable than the actual remote living towns that no one wants to be in so they're just an aging population of dead enders and people hooked on drugs. Or at least an area with a University nearby so that you can go somewhere with some energy/vibrance and the latest cool trendy food. The realities of dead end small town/no town america can be pretty soul crushing.
Disney style curated small town america catering to the wealthy can be a pretty great place to live and have energy/vibrancy. Plus you'll have a good revolving supply of new people cycling through thinking they want to live the lifestyle (before the realities set in) bringing in the latest trends, starting food places, etc. Just make sure they aren't the 'escaping from California' types blathering about how great it is to be in a 'free' state and be away from commie land. That toxicity can overload a small community quick. You can get away with 'individualists' in a larger community where their actual freeloading on society is subsidized by normal people, but with too big a ratio basic civilian institutions get paralyzed for years until people remember/relearn society requires a social component.
By and large most of BC wasn't economic enough to justify solar as a replacement for grid power, but I haven't checked those numbers in a while. We do have relatively cheap hydro power, so there's not a hugely strong incentive either. There's other reasons that might justify an install however, especially for off-grid folks.
If it's an hour away, does it really qualify as "urgent" care?
Large distances for planned care is probably manageable. For urgent care not so much. Living alone also means not having someone else that can signal the emergency services when something is wrong.
Maybe pick up a personal anti choking device (https://www.amazon.com/anti-choking-device/s?k=anti+choking+...) as well.
Also, I a bought a ramshackle building at auction that I am turning into a community workshop. It will be fun!
Look at a map and see what is furthest from a highway, but technically accessible by some sort of old road or trail. Look at a mineral rights map and find the most remote gold rush era mining claims.
You won’t see people often in these places because your standard 4x4 lacks the fuel range to get there- gasoline engines have very poor range at low speeds. You need something capable but also fuel efficient- usually something with a small diesel engine, which are not very available in the US market. More remote places also tend to have a lot of cumulative water damage to trails so are very technical- requiring a lot of patience (e.g. stacking rocks for hours) and a lot of driving skill.
A fun thing about Baja is that often these super remote fuel stations end up being closed or out of fuel, so you can't realistically do it without having the supplies and fuel for at least 2x what it looks like you should need.
That's basically where I'm getting my "two days" from- the time from one fuel station to the next with about ~8 hours of actual travel per day.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42104894
With more than 14,000 of them, it's not possible to be more than 115 or so miles from one:
And 115 miles? That’s a huge distance.
Not huge enough when you're considering how the McDonald's have driven out little hole-in-the-wall places and that the presence of such a fast food restaurant requires a busy highway, or a reasonably dense population center.
once you're established you can collect rainwater. https://ca.water.usgs.gov/mojave/ says:
> Most areas of the basin floor receive 4 to 6 inches of precipitation per year, although annual precipitation can be greater than 40 inches in the southern and eastern San Bernardino and the San Gabriel Mountains (Lines, 1996). Recharge to the groundwater system from direct infiltration of precipitation is minimal.
in modern units "4 inches" is 100 millimeters, so that's about 3 nanometers per second
each person needs about 6 liters of water per day (burning man recommendation, including hygiene, dishwashing, etc., but not garden irrigation) or 70 microliters per second. 70 microliters divided by 3 nanometers is about 20 square meters, so even in the desert you don't need a large catchment to keep your cistern full. this isn't the atacama
if you want to be far from civilization in america, though, the atacama is pretty good for that. parts of patagonia might be better and do have rain
Go to Wyoming or Montana. You get a 2 or 3 hr drive outside major cities and you might be the only person around for 10+ miles.
Anywhere not colored
For someone it could be defined as minimal human interaction, for others it could be a function of distance from the nearest urban/ suburban center. For most, it would be some combination of these two.
I've backpacked to some very remote places around the world, but it's hard to beat the USA (western half), Canada, Russia (east of Moscow) and Australia (anywhere not on the coast).
And like I say, if you want peace and quiet you don't have to put your life at risk by going out of range of water, power, roads, phone coverage etc.
Ignore me, I'm sure I just don't get it.
I’d like more land still - I grew up on 60 acres - but I still basically have complete privacy.
I can get 200+ acres in Maine for the same price as 5 acres in NJ, and have much higher confidence that nothing is going to be built adjacent to me. Especially if I get land abutting conservation land.
I'm always intrigued by this notion, I know plenty of Americans have this kind of plan, but it's never quite as remote as they think, because, y'know you're still in America somewhere.
Unless you're thinking of somewhere in northern Canada.
I'd love to know where is considered 'far from civilization' on the continental US.