Where next in North America?
I’ve joined my college friends four times in the last four years for an annual adventure trip:
August 2013 - 67.7°N 153.3°W
Hiking in Alaska’s remote Gates of the Arctic National Park
September 2012 - 16.5°N 88.3°W
Sea kayaking 18 miles from the coast of Belize
March 2011 - 39.4°N 106.1°W
Snowshoeing in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado
March 2010 - 6.6°N, 83.6°W
Three day jungle hike in Costa Rica
We all met in school in New York.
September 2006 - May 2010 - 40.81°N 73.96°W
Plotting these four places, plus New York, on a map:
I was curious to know:
which locations in North America are furthest from the places we’ve already traveled?
I drew two giant rectangles covering the rest of the world to create a zone to exclude from my analysis – one rectangle covered all space east of the mid-Atlantic, ending at the western edge of Alaska; the other rectangle excluded South America.
I went on to define a more precise range that excludes the major bodies of water bordering North America, such as the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans.
Then, I used Excel to calculate a spherical distance “as the crow flies” between every coordinate in North America (whole degrees only), and each of the five places we’ve visited.
Here’s an example, using Winnipeg, Manitoba, at 50°N 97°W,
The minimum distance from Winnipeg to to any place we’ve traveled is is 857 spherical miles, to Colorado. Are there points with minimum distances larger than 857 miles in the non-excluded regions of the map?
There are. I calculated a minimum distance for each coordinate in North America to the five places we’ve traveled. I sorted these minimum distances from largest to smallest. This would reveal the coordinates furthest from any of the five places we’ve visited.
Three clusters appear when I constrain the list to the largest 400 minimum distances.
1 - The Canadian Territories surrounding Hudson Bay (Manitoba, Nunavut and Quebec).
2 - Grenada, and the southern Caribbean islands such as St. Vincent, St. Lucia and Barbados.
3 - British Columbia and the jagged islands of Southeastern Alaska.
Those are three ideas for where to go in 2014.
I used http://www.darrinward.com/lat-long/ to generate the maps.
I used Chip Pearson’s http://www.cpearson.com/excel/LatLong.aspx to calculate spherical distances.
The Mercator projection on Google maps exaggerates distances and land areas near the poles. This explains why the line from Winnipeg to Alaska looks longer than those lines drawn to Central America, despite the greater spherical distance from Winnipeg to Belize.