Tonopah, NV Is Nevada's Loneliest Inhabited Place: 124 Miles to Bishop in CA
Tonopah, NV — population 2,723, Nye County — is the most isolated inhabited place in Nevada. The nearest city of 10,000+ residents is Bishop, CA, sitting 124 straight-line miles away — across the state line in CA. Nevada has 70 towns under 10,000 residents; Tonopah is the most isolated among them.
The link opens the SimpleMapLab Map Radius Tool with a 50-mile circle drawn around Tonopah. Try expanding the radius to see how far you have to look before encountering any 10,000+ city — the answer is roughly 124 miles in the direction of Bishop.
Why this happened
Tonopah, Nevada is the loneliest town outside Montana in the lower 48. The former silver-mining boomtown — once Nevada's second-largest city in the early 1900s — sits 124 miles from the nearest qualifying city (Bishop, California). The drive crosses high desert with no anchor city in between.
Nevada's geography produces this pattern: roughly 80% of the state's population lives in Las Vegas or Reno metro, leaving the basin-and-range interior with hundreds of miles between any two towns of meaningful size. Tonopah's 2,723 residents sit roughly halfway between Las Vegas (210 mi) and Reno (210 mi) along US-95 — both far outside the 100-mile reach.
Nevada's 5 most isolated towns
The top 5 most-isolated inhabited places in Nevada, sorted by distance to the nearest 10,000+ city.
| # | Town | Pop. | Distance to nearest 10K+ | Nearest city |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tonopah | 2,723 | 124 mi | Bishop, CA |
| 2 | Lund | 393 | 120 mi | Spring Creek, NV |
| 3 | Duckwater | 103 | 118 mi | Spring Creek, NV |
| 4 | Baker | 213 | 117 mi | Cedar City, UT |
| 5 | Ruth | 298 | 95 mi | Spring Creek, NV |
How Nevada compares
The states ranked closest to Nevada on this metric. Click any for the dedicated breakdown.
Draw your own radius
Open a 50-mile circle around Tonopah →
Try the 100-mile radius to see whether a major city falls inside — for Tonopah, it doesn't, because the nearest qualifying city (Bishop, CA) sits 124 miles away.
More about Nevada
See the full breakdown of Nevada's counties at /states/nevada/counties — population, area, median income, and county seat for every county, plus a labeled printable map. The companion study 100-mile radius around Nevada's capital measures the share of Nevada'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 Nevada 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 Nevada's loneliest. Full methodology on the hub page.
Suggested citation: SimpleMapLab (2026). The Loneliest Towns in America: Nevada. Part of the Most Remote Inhabited Places study. Retrieved from https://www.simplemaplab.com/studies/most-remote-places/nevada. CC-BY 4.0.