Finding the Most Inaccessible Spot in the San Gabriel Mountains
Poles of Inaccessibility in the San Gabriel Mountains
A hiker's question about the least accessible point in the San Gabriel Mountains led to a computational quest. Using OpenStreetMap data and Voronoi diagrams, the author mapped all roads and trails, projected them onto a tangent plane, and calculated the point farthest from any path. The result: a spot 4.3 km from the nearest trail, with variations depending on whether trails or only paved roads are considered. The code is open-sourced.
The Pole of Inaccessibility is about 4.3 km from the nearest trail/road.
- crancher
Context for non-Los Angeles residents: the San Gabriel Mountains are those seen looming behind downtown LA in many photos.
https://www.treehugger.com/special-places-in-the-san-gabriel...
Also probably context for many LA people, as most seem to consider those mountains a Hollywood backdrop, not a place you can be in 90 minutes from anywhere in LA (with favorable traffic).
- Uncle_Brumpus
This reminds me of something I saw on a backpacking blog sometime last year. Project Remote, a family that's finding and hiking to all the "most remote" place in each state of the USA.
Here's some of the statistics:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240621094642/https://www.proje...
The most surprising one to me is: Least Remote: Kansas (0.8 miles from a road).
As someone who lives in the very densely populated greater Boston area, Kansas doesn't exactly strike me as a prime candidate for not being able to get away from roads.
Their website seems to have been commandeered by some Indonesian online casino scam thing in late 2024 and is now offline. I'm unsure of the ongoing state of the project.
- tony_cannistra
somewhat sad to say that if you follow the map link (https://caltopo.com/m/4N7A) there's in fact a trail right next to the "point of inaccessibility" that includes trails + roads.
The path was added to OSM two years ago, which is after the analysis was done. OSM is a moving target!