They say the heart is a lonely hunter, but as a nation casts its lonely heart to the American wilderness, it seems true loneliness is getting harder to find.

The map of the wilderness on this page illustrates 'opportunities for solitude' -- which is to say, parts of the wilderness over half a mile away from human development are shaded cyan (distant from development outside the wilderness) or pink (distant from development inside the wilderness). Developments in this case are primarily roads, trails, and structures like buildings, water tanks, and power lines.

Did this page take a long time to load? This is because instead of doing the spatial analysis in advance, we are reading topojson files of boundary and development layers and doing the buffering, dissolving, intersecting, and grouping in the browser. If you noticed the page sends a lot of messages to the console while it works, you noticed it's not fast. It's less fast as more developments are added. To be discussed.