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.
More about Montana
See the full breakdown of Montana's counties at /states/montana/counties — population, area, median income, and county seat for every county, plus a labeled printable map. The companion study 100-mile radius around Montana's capital measures the share of Montana's population that lives within day-trip distance of the capitol — an inverse framing of the isolation question this page poses.
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.