Original photo by Rui Serra Maia/ Shutterstock
The American West is known for its wide open spaces, but nowhere is quite as wide open as the area around Glasgow, Montana. Crunching some numbers back in 2018 in an effort to definitively define “the middle of nowhere,” The Washington Post found that a whopping 98% of Americans in the contiguous U.S. live within an hour of some kind of urban center (that is, a metropolitan area with at least 75,000 people). But Glasgow, located in the northeast corner of the state, is an estimated 4.5 hours from the nearest urban center, making it the most isolated town (with a population of 1,000 or more) in the Lower 48.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a factThough you might think that Glasgow has an intimate connection with Scotland, the isolated Montana town, previously named “Siding 45,” was actually named randomly after a railroad clerk spun a globe and his finger landed on the Scottish city.
Glasgow was founded in 1887 as a railroad town, and during World War II was home to the Glasgow Army Airfield, which eventually transformed into the Glasgow Valley County Airport. After a nearby Air Force base left town in the late ’60s, Glasgow’s population settled around 3,000. Although it’s now the most remote town on the mainland, many towns in Alaska rival Glasgow’s “middle of nowhere” claim when it comes to the nation as a whole. Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow, is the U.S.’s northernmost city, is only accessible by plane, and is 500 miles away from Fairbanks. In other words, Alaska takes the idea of “wide open spaces” to a whole new level.
Numbers Don't Lie
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The farthest spot from land is called ______, after a character in “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.”
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The farthest spot from land is called Point Nemo, after a character in “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.”
The object farthest from the sun in our solar system is called Farfarout.
Things don’t get much more isolated than the trans-Neptunian object (TNO) Farfarout — so named because it’s the farthest known object in our solar system. With the technical name 2018 AG37, Farfarout takes an entire millennium to complete its orbit around the sun; it’s an average of 132 astronomical units (AU) away from our host star. With one AU equaling the distance between Earth and the sun (about 93 million miles), Farfarout is true to its name. However, depending on where it is in its orbit, Farfarout can be up to 175 AU away or as close as 27 AU, which is about as near as Neptune. While astronomers found this far-flung celestial body searching for “Planet X” — an unknown, hypothesized planet somewhere beyond the orbit of Neptune (sorry, Pluto) — Farfarout puts the “dwarf” in dwarf planet, as it stretches only about 250 miles across.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
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