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Upper Michigan - Copper Harbor is the town furthest away from an interstate in the continental United States. Only some areas of remote Maine and a small portion of the far northern tip of Minnesota can come close to it outside the West. Love all three regions.
Alaska is a given, so in the lower 48 I'd have to go with most of NV and much of the Great Basin region. When I lived in Western CO we took frequent road trips, including many 6-12 hour drives where you encounter very little in the way of populated areas. But in my opinion, the most isolated stretches always seemed to be those between the Wasatch and the Cascades/Sierra Nevada. Long, long stretches of desolate western scenery.
Eastern Oregon. Central Nevada. Eastern Montana (nicknamed "the big nothing"). All of Wyoming except for the NW corner of the state. Much of Trans-Pecos Texas.
Midcentral WV and Northcentral PA. Hills, gorges, and forests. In the winter, those areas are as remote as places in Maine or Alaska.
I imagine places like these and the Northwoods have a very isolated feeling from being closed in by the valleys and forests. Out west we can often see a mountain 50+ miles away and towns and cities are often visible long before you get to them.
One time I took New Mexico Highway 104 between Tucumcari and Las Vegas, NM and I remember being the only car on the road for the majority of the over 100 miles drive.
Don't remember any gas stations between these two cities but every 20 miles or so, you would see tiny communities of rusty, mostly dilapidated mobile homes out in the middle of nowhere. It makes you wonder why would anybody live in places like these Awesome experience.
You might like the book, "Miles From Nowhere: Tales From America's Contemproray Frontier" by Dayton Duncan. It was written in 2000 but doesn't include Alaska or Hawaii.
"Dayton Duncan set out in an aging GMC Suburban to visit a large sampling of counties outside Alaska that have fewer than two persons per square mile—the (census) bureau's old standard for places still in a frontier condition. There are 132 such counties. All are in the West. . . . The result of his tour is an insightful and entertaining book, troubling and funny and consistently illuminating. . . . Much of the book's charm comes from Duncan's sketches of people who choose to live 'miles from nowhere'—ranchers in the Nebraska sandhills, a New Mexican bar owner, a priest and United Parcel Service driver along the Texas-Mexico border, and the descendant of a Seminole Negro army scout in west Texas. In them he finds characteristics associated with the mythic frontier." Amazon book description.
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