Denver Is the Middle of Nowhere

The Denver Metropolitan Statistical Area is only, using 2021 estimates, the 19^th-largest in the United States. It’s smaller than the Tampa Bay area. It’s smaller than the Inland Empire. It’s only a little bigger than St. Louis.

Nevertheless, Denver has every single thing a big city has. It has all teams in all the Big Four leagues. It has a gigantic airport. It has a dozen kids you went to high school with. It’s name is almost always on the map, no matter how far out you zoom.

Something I don’t think we appreciate about Denver is that it is the most isolated city in the United States. Technically, no, I know, Fairbanks or something is more isolated. But among big metropolitan areas, and even among medium and small ones, no city is set as far from everything else as Denver. One example of this? Time zones:

With Phoenix only spending a few months of the year actually on Mountain Time, it’s only Denver and Salt Lake City in Mountain among the fifty biggest population centers in the U.S., and Salt Lake City? It hardly cracks the top 50, coming in at 46^th in population, narrowly ahead of Grand Rapids at 51^st. Boise is not a top-50 metro area. Albuquerque is not a top-50 metro area. None of the five Montana cities are top-50 metro areas. Look at the space radiating out from Denver in this map:

If you thought Omaha was in the middle of nowhere…

Going through various thresholds, here’s how close Denver is to other MSA’s of various sizes, along with Salt Lake City (another contender for most isolated) and Portland (a third contender for the crown). Distances are in miles and are taken as the crow flies, from Google Maps.

Denver is more isolated than Salt Lake City, a place bordered on one side by a desert covered entirely in salt and bordered on the other with mountains stretching thirteen thousand feet in the air. To a point, it’s more isolated than the Pacific Northwest, a corner of the country boxed in by the entire Northern Rockies and the upper half of California. From Denver, it takes over eight hours to drive to another population center of two million people. Even folks in Bismarck, North Dakota can get to one of those in six.

Population in America—and I mean mass population, not population at all—expanded west for a long, long time. Now, though, the West is getting full. The East has been full for a long time. The middle of the country—the real middle, centered around Topeka—is where the frontiers, for what they are, now exist. Go Central, young man. Go Mountain. Fill in all those little cracks between the peaks.