Off the Grid

Find the most remote corners of the Adirondacks — the spots furthest from any road, trail, or railroad track. Pick what counts as access — all roads or paved ones only, with or without trails and private land — hover anywhere for the remoteness there, search for a place, or click the map to see what’s nearby. Switch on 3D terrain and right-drag (or ctrl-drag) to tilt the whole park into relief. The measuring tape totals a route as you lay it down. How this map was made, and what counts as a road.

Measure remoteness from

Base map

Terrain

Map layers

Distance to nearest feature

Measured distance

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click the map to start

Click to drop points along a route. Backspace undoes the last one, Esc finishes.

Remoteness at cursor

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to nearest road, trail, or track

move over the map

☕ Coffee

Suggest an improvement

Ideas, corrections, or bugs for this map — thank you!

Method & sources: what counts as a road, how a road gets called paved, and how the distances are computed. · Data: NYS DEC DECinfo Locator (trails, roads, land units, Blue Line) · NYSDOT Roadway Inventory (pavement type) · U.S. Census TIGER 2023 (all roads, water) · OpenStreetMap (Adirondack Railroad main line, Remsen–Tupper Lake; road surface tags) · USGS The National Map (topo) · Esri / Maxar / Earthstar Geographics (imagery) · Natural Earth (Lake Champlain) · elevation from AWS Terrain Tiles (USGS 3DEP / SRTM). Straight-line distances, computed in UTM 18N. TIGER records a road’s class but not its surface, so “paved” comes from the NYSDOT Roadway Inventory, the state’s official centerline file and the source behind the annual Highway Mileage Report, which records a surface for every public road. The private and unmaintained roads it does not carry — logging roads, camp roads, Forest Preserve administrative roads — fall to OpenStreetMap surface tags and then to road class. A road none of the three can place is counted as paved, which understates remoteness rather than overstating it. Click anywhere to name the wilderness or forest; click a marker for spot details.