Pole of road inaccessibility of the contiguous US
So I want out hiking with a friend, and he was telling me about a 9-day backpacking trip he took to reach some back-country cabin, which is said to be further away from any driveable road than any other spot in the continental US.
I computed something very similar earlier so I decided to extend the previous work to the whole continental US to check if that area really is the road Pole of Inaccessibility. Note that for the San Gabriels I was looking at 3 different poles:
Here I'm looking at the middle one. This is an arbitrary choice, and I'm only doing that to match my friend's trip. As before, the OpenStreetMap database is the source of data, so the results are only as good as that dataset. I've found the data to be fairly good, and in any case, that's the only available source of data.
I ran the computations, and updated the previous repo: https://github.com/dkogan/inaccessibility. So where is this point? My friend was sure that it was either in the SE corner of Yellowstone National Park (where he went) or in the Frank Church wilderness in Idaho, or the Bob Marshall wilderness in Montana. Want to know which one of these areas contains the pole? Read on.
