"McSparseness," U.S.A.

The place in the contiguous United States where you can get farthest away from a McDonald’s is in remote northwestern South Dakota, a visual artist and mapmaker figures.

“To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s,” writes Stephen Von Worley, a blogger and visual artist who says he came to this conclusion on seeing golden arches on a dispiriting drive down Interstate 5 in central California.

And so it dawned on him that to locate the antithesis of such strip-mall sameness, it makes sense to find the remotest point from any McDonald’s in the lower 48 states, as the crow flies. And to do that you need to plot the locations of each of the roughly 13,000 of them across the land, as Von Worley does in the illuminating (some would say alarming) map above.

As the map suggests, you then need to go west, young crassness detester. Von Worley writes:

For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota. There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer. Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!

Suffer a Big Mac Attack out there, and you’re hurtin’ for certain! [Weather-Sealed]

[http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/mcsparseness-usa/]