My previous post determined that there was no way to travel across the US on an west-east parallel without encountering a building (in fact, you’ll run into hundreds of them). Today we’ll figure out if there’s a north-south line of longitude (or, meridian) that avoids man-made structures.
At first glance, it seems more likely. There are a lot of western states that are fairly empty, and they stack up nicely in a north-south manner: Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona. Surely there’s some path down from Canada to Mexico that doesn’t hit any buildings?
Turns out, there isn’t, but there almost is. None of the meridians1over 5500 were analyzed completely avoid buildings, but there are two that each intersect just a single building. Both of the two paths cross a house, but a different house. The paths start just a couple of hundred yards apart, at the Canada-Montana border. They head south through Montana and into Idaho. After 336 miles, the first path runs into a house near Lowman, Idaho:
(Best viewed on a PC. Use the 
button to view fullscreen.)
After that, there are no more buildings until the Mexican border. You travel through the rest of Idaho, then Nevada (avoiding Las Vegas by a few miles to the west), then eastern California, finishing in the farm fields near El Centro, 796 miles after the Lowman house.
The second meridian starts just 219 yards further east on the Canadian border. It avoids the houses in Lowman, but then runs smack into this home on the outskirts of Hammett, Idaho:
The overall path looks very similar to the previous one:
There’s one more path of interest. Imagine that you hoped to walk an entire meridian without encountering a building (and assume you didn’t check Google before you left). At the Canadian border you start at 115.4256 degrees west and head due south. You walk 1,119 miles with nary a building in your way, and are practically in sight of the Mexican border (just 12 and half miles away). You’re feeling pretty good about your chances. And then, you run into the Schaffner Dairy:
That fact that you hit four more buildings after that would be anticlimactic….
