Short answer: not easy at all. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it difficult, difficult, lemon difficult. And yet, visual artist Stephen Vorley decided to try. That is, he wanted to find the remotest point in the contiguous United States from any McDonalds.

He plotted the locations of all the Mickey D’s outlets in the lower 48 and made the awesome map you see on the right (click to enlarge). He quickly gave up on the east coast (well, excuuuse us!) and looked 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.”

It turns out the magic spot was in Glad Valley, South Dakota, 107 miles from the closest McDonalds. This may sound nice to those of you who don’t like fast food. But, might I reiterate, you’d also be in South Dakota. Just sayin’.