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 Death Valley terrain 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.
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.