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Comment by kcvv | Hacker News Reader

It would be an interesting problem to see / solve where in this map would a drop travel the most. By just clicking, I got one that travels from Cavour, South Dakota to Gulf of Mexico over a 3523 Kms journey. I am sure there must be something that is longer!

Edit - some of the routes stop at border of Canada - is this due to lack of dataset?

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The source of the Missouri River - Brower's Spring apparently - is probably close to the point where it's longest. I can't find it exactly on this map, but have got up to 5790km, from a point just by Yellowstone Airport.

The code is at https://github.com/sdl60660/river-runner/, it would be quite possible to base a solver on that.

Ha I appreciate you sharing the repo, but if someone is interested in finding a longest route, they should probably just go straight to the data source (USGS NHDPlus data/NLDI API)

The longest route in this dataset is almost certainly from Northwest Montana to the Gulf of Mexico; see, eg. the beautiful illustration of watersheds in North America at [1]. Example: [2]

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/maps-worlds-watersheds/

[2] https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-113.26136901231438...

You can click in Northern Montana for longer routes, e.g. Browning, Montana gives about 5587km.

This is cool! Did you have some info on this or use some data to find this? I was randomly clicking points on center of US and many were just ending in a nearby lake. I only found a few that ended up in the sea..

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