What do portions of Wyoming and Maine have in common? In each state, there are several counties where the population is fewer than one person per square mile.
That may come as a surprise to some people, especially because Maine’s population is more than double that of Wyoming’s.
Here’s another bit of unexpected trivia: When considering what percentage of each state’s population lives in a rural area, Maine ranks second (behind Vermont), whereas Wyoming comes in at the No. 12 spot, behind both of the Dakotas and Montana.
“Wyoming is not as rural as people think,” said Jim Fonseca, a retired professor of geography and dean emeritus at Ohio University in Zanesville. He’s also the author of “The One Minute Geographer” on Medium, where he writes about world geography.
The reason why people might be surprised by Wyoming’s rural ranking is because the U.S. Census Bureau classifies urban areas as having at least 2,000 housing units, or a population of at least 5,000 people.
Anything else is considered rural.
Rural is less so people living alone in the woods and more so lots of small towns with only a few hundred people apiece, which is common in states like Maine and Vermont, Fonseca said.
“One thing we’re dealing with is the unexpected definition of what is rural,” he said.
Thorofare’s Remoteness
Wyoming does, indeed, rightfully live up to its widespread distinction as home to the most remote place in the continental U.S. That’s the Thorofare Ranger Station, located in the southeast corner of Yellowstone National Park.
There are so many different ways to measure remoteness that Jerome Dobson, the longtime former president of the American Geographical Society, was a bit dubious about Thorofare’s claim to fame.
But the ranger station came out on top as the most remote location in the lower 48 when Dobson considered the following factors: how long it would take to hike to the nearest trailhead, the distance to the nearest fast-food restaurant and the difficulty of the trail.
“It turned out to be a pretty good measure of remoteness,” he said.
To be fair, three locations in Alaska — within the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Reserve, Denali National Park and Preserve and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Reserve — are more remote than Thorofare.
But Dobson, who is also a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, said the ranking of remoteness still was a bit surprising.
“What really struck me was that the places that I thought might compete for most remote weren’t on the list,” he said.
Specifically, he said he was surprised that the top 25 most remote locations, by his measure, didn’t include locations somewhere in the Appalachia or near the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.
Despite its relative ruralness, Maine doesn’t have a location that ranked highly by Dobson’s measures for remoteness.
Rural Flight
But when thinking about how rural Wyoming is, Fonseca said, the state shares many commonalities with other areas of the country — including Maine.
Ruralites nationwide are grappling with finding sufficient job opportunities or easily accessing groceries and medical services. That’s why so many young people have deemed that being rural is a disadvantage, and rural populations are aging as the younger generations move elsewhere, he added.
That’s also why Wyoming is pretty typical in one regard: most of the population lives within a relatively short distance of the I-80 or I-25 corridors.
“We’ve tended to organize ourselves in these areas since the automobile was invented,” Fonseca said.
The Thorofare Ranger Station in the southwest corner of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming has long been credited as the most remote place in the Lower 48. A geographer testing this claim found Maine is more rural than Wyoming. (Courtesy National Park Service) 
The Thorofare Ranger Station in the southwest corner of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming has long been credited as the most remote place in the Lower 48. A geographer testing this claim found Maine is more rural than Wyoming. (Courtesy National Park Service)
