Poles of Inaccessibility in the San Gabriel Mountains (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Poles of Inaccessibility in the San Gabriel Mountains (2015)

notes.secretsauce.net

36 pointsdima5521 comments

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.

Kansas is mostly a gigantic farm and there’s farm roads every mile or so. Laying out roads along section (square mile, 640 acres) or quarter section (160 acre) boundaries is probably how Kansas developed its road network. 36 sections make up a township, 6 sections by 6 sections. Most (?) land between California and the Mississippi River is surveyed like this, probably excluding Texas since that was a country and originally held by Spain/Mexico.

The Wikipedia article for section (survey) has an aerial photo of Kansas in it, naturally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(United_States_land_su...

I'm extremely surprised that Wyoming is more remote than Alaska! I wouldn't think Alaska has that many back-country roads running through it.

Edit: they have another page describing Alaska. It seems that the linked page might only describe the contiguous US? But also, wow. This seems stupid:

> Thoughts of roadless Alaska came to mind and our amazing, wild trek through the Brooks Range of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We hired a bush plane to drop us off in a nameless valley. At 50 miles from the nearest village or road, we were awed with excitement and healthy fear. We agreed to meet up 9 days and 35 miles later at a flat spot where he could land on the tundra marked by a heap of moose antlers. He looked at us awfully cock-eyed when we told him we had no satellite phone. He asked, “well, why not?” We told him that we were deliberately here to remove ourselves from civilization and contact with it. Watching our pilot fly away, we realized we were as far from towns and roads, and therefore, humans as we could possibly imagine.

I've been to this area and being close to a road does not mean human contact. I drove on that road for nine hours and saw a handful of people/buildings.

"Towns" on a map might literally be a single home up there. It's as remote as can be even alongside utility roads.

Yeah beyond the obvious, you have appendicitis or something and die an agonizing death. Suppose something happens to the pilot.

I've done some pretty stupid things in my day relating to various activities far* from civilization (my dumbest being an offroad motorcycle trip by myself for which I was not nearly experienced enough, dumped the bike several times, crossed a bridge that definitely wasn't designed to hold a motorcycle, etc.), but I both applaud and receive second-hand anxiety from their massive commitment.

*technically not remote at all in this context as they all took place on trails

Well Kansas has the benefit of being utterly flat and also quite homogenous biome wise. Even though it has no people I' assuming without looking at it that the entire state has been chopped up into square mile sized squares.

Yeah, if "road" is satisfied with tractor path that leads back to a road, that sub-mile distance doesn't seem hard to believe

Kansas genuinely has a ton of paved and gravel roads all across the state. It's like a gigantic grid. Oddly high amount of street-view coverage too on google maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/EyBFj9BNQa8nhUcE6

The Kansas landscape is very underrated. Just infinite sky in all directions.

I agree about that landscape. The state is not as flat as people think it is either. Very scenic. I worked the southwest corner of the state years ago and always loved topping a local high spot. We were surveying and out there we could set a flag a half mile away and sight off of that easily with plane table and alidade or theodolite. The atmospheric distortion would get you on a humid day or if you were shooting across a wheat field with all the transpiration but otherwise it was clear with minimal shimmer.

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).

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!

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1255896413

This isn't really a path, and certainly not an official trail. It's a use trail [1] that should probably get (edit: now has) an informal=yes tag [2]. I think it still counts!

[1]: https://ironhiker.blogspot.com/2025/08/baden-powell-x3-and-r...

[2]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:informal%3Dyes

Nice find! I was dinking around GEarth looking at routes and never thought to look for stuff like this.

If you flip the map view to display the CyclOSM overlay you can see that the new path follows the ridgeline from Mount Baden-Powell to Ross Mountain. In the linked article when the final map is displayed I was looking at the drainage to help understand the topography and it looked like there had to be a ridge across there.

The Roads Only Pole of Inaccessibility would require a hike downslope from Ross Mtn peak to about 1400-1450m elevation. You could use the ridge that runs SE away from the peak of Ross Mountain to a bench at about 1695m elevation just NE of the spot and, depending on terrain, could hike the last 650 m (as the crow flies) to the curve in that stream channel 300 m downslope. The map sympbols indicate it is meadow so you can probably see where you're heading all the way. (LOL, I checked GEarth and it isn't meadow at all. The slope looks steep but I'm sure a dedicated hiker could manage.)

After spending a bit of time on GEarth looking at this location it appears that the Roads Only point is probably the Ross Gulch in the Johnson Corner area. Without ever having been there and using only GEarth and the photos people have posted in that locality to get an idea of terrain I think the easiest way to reach that point is to follow the ridge from Ross Mountain as described to the bench noted. You'll be above that bend in the Gulch on the east side where the slopes are less steep and you should be able to zig-zag across terrain to the point.

To access the Paved Driving Allowed Roads Only Pole of Inaccessibility you probably want to just take the Iron Mountain Trail up to the peak (2419 m) and hike downslope about 500 m in elevation (around 1 km best guess for hiking distance) along that NNW trending ridge to the north of that drainage above the Fish Fork campground down on the river.

Thanks. This was fun.

The OP a big OSM user and maintains https://eispiraten.com/ where there was more than one discussion about this

https://eispiraten.com/viewtopic.php?p=53599

Makes the Pole of Inaccessibility easier to visit - win-win!

Living here in So Cal, where the mountains are a constant presence.

Yet, I still stare and wonder. Despite people having been here for thousands of years, I look at a ridge, or a spot on the mountain, and just wonder "has anyone been there before".

There are all sorts of reasons to not "go" there. There's "nothing there" to go to. It's hard to get to. There may not even be an animal trail up there. Even the sheep are smart enough to leave it be.

But I wonder.

I look at the ridge few miles north of my house, and, in the back of my head, I have a Plan to hike it someday. Just walk the ridge. It doesn't seem arduous, it's not Everest. Seems like only ("only") 15 miles.

But I do wonder, if anyone has done it before, and were they thinking about it like I was.

I once made a similar map at work, but for the whole USA. You can view it if you use onX Hunt - called the "Roadless" layer under "Roads Trails & Rec."

There's a link at the top of the article for that too: https://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2017/09/25_pole-of-road-...

It turns out that Claude at least loves devouring arcgis maps, and has already found interesting things about my area that were always out there, but not correlated.

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