138 Miles From Anywhere: How Opheim, MT Became Montana's Most Isolated Town
Opheim, MT — population 242, Valley County — is the most isolated inhabited place in Montana. The nearest city of 10,000+ residents is Williston, ND, sitting 138 straight-line miles away — across the state line in ND. Montana has 309 towns under 10,000 residents; Opheim is the most isolated among them.
The link opens the SimpleMapLab Map Radius Tool with a 50-mile circle drawn around Opheim. Try expanding the radius to see how far you have to look before encountering any 10,000+ city — the answer is roughly 138 miles in the direction of Williston.
Why this happened
Opheim, Montana is the loneliest inhabited town in the lower 48 states. With 242 year-round residents and 138 straight-line miles to the nearest city of 10,000 (Williston, North Dakota), Opheim sits on the Hi-Line — the historic Great Northern Railway corridor that runs along Montana's border with Saskatchewan. The railroad still passes through; the towns it built up never recovered after the highway era.
Montana dominates the lower-48 loneliest-town list: four of the top five most isolated places in the contiguous US (Opheim, Glasgow, Saint Marie, Hinsdale) sit in this same Hi-Line corridor. Glasgow, MT — population 4,606 — is the largest town in the entire region but still doesn't cross the 10,000 anchor threshold; its nearest qualifying city is Miles City, 128 miles south.
Montana's 5 most isolated towns
The top 5 most-isolated inhabited places in Montana, sorted by distance to the nearest 10,000+ city.
| # | Town | Pop. | Distance to nearest 10K+ | Nearest city |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Opheim | 242 | 138 mi | Williston, ND |
| 2 | Glasgow | 4,606 | 128 mi | Miles City, MT |
| 3 | Saint Marie | 306 | 128 mi | Williston, ND |
| 4 | Hinsdale | 439 | 126 mi | Havre, MT |
| 5 | Larslan | 63 | 120 mi | Williston, ND |
How Montana compares
The states ranked closest to Montana on this metric. Click any for the dedicated breakdown.
Draw your own radius
Open a 50-mile circle around Opheim →
Try the 100-mile radius to see whether a major city falls inside — for Opheim, it doesn't, because the nearest qualifying city (Williston, ND) sits 138 miles away.
Methodology (brief)
We aggregate the US Census ZCTA dataset by postal city, treating any (postal city, state) pair with ≥ 50 residents as a town. Anchor cities are places with ≥ 10,000 residents. For every Montana town below the anchor threshold, we compute the straight-line distance to every anchor city in the US (cross-state distances count). The town with the largest minimum distance is Montana's loneliest. Full methodology on the hub page.
Suggested citation: SimpleMapLab (2026). The Loneliest Towns in America: Montana. Part of the Most Remote Inhabited Places study. Retrieved from https://www.simplemaplab.com/studies/most-remote-places/montana. CC-BY 4.0.