Lance Creek, WY Is Wyoming's Most Remote Inhabited Place — 84 Miles to Gillette
Lance Creek, WY — population 161, Niobrara County — is the most isolated inhabited place in Wyoming. The nearest city of 10,000+ residents is Gillette, WY, sitting 84 straight-line miles away. Wyoming has 137 towns under 10,000 residents; Lance Creek is the most isolated among them.
The link opens the SimpleMapLab Map Radius Tool with a 50-mile circle drawn around Lance Creek. Try expanding the radius to see how far you have to look before encountering any 10,000+ city — the answer is roughly 84 miles in the direction of Gillette.
Why this happened
Wyoming's loneliest town — typically a small Big Horn Basin or northeast Plains settlement — sits 90+ miles from the nearest 10,000+ city. The Big Horn Basin is geographically cut off from Wyoming's main population corridors (Cheyenne, Casper) by the Bighorn Mountains; northeastern Wyoming (Crook, Weston counties) is similarly isolated from Sheridan and Gillette.
Wyoming's population density is the lowest in the lower 48 (~6 residents per square mile). The state's basin-and-range geography fragments the population into isolated clusters — Cheyenne in the south, Casper in the middle, Cody in the northwest, Sheridan in the north, with hundreds of miles of essentially empty range between each. The "loneliest town" stat is durable here; only a major demographic shift would change it.
Wyoming's 5 most isolated towns
The top 5 most-isolated inhabited places in Wyoming, sorted by distance to the nearest 10,000+ city.
| # | Town | Pop. | Distance to nearest 10K+ | Nearest city |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lance Creek | 161 | 84 mi | Gillette, WY |
| 2 | Glendo | 786 | 79 mi | Casper, WY |
| 3 | Manville | 363 | 77 mi | Scottsbluff, NE |
| 4 | Lusk | 1,616 | 75 mi | Scottsbluff, NE |
| 5 | Rawlins | 8,180 | 75 mi | Lander, WY |
How Wyoming compares
The states ranked closest to Wyoming on this metric. Click any for the dedicated breakdown.
Draw your own radius
Open a 50-mile circle around Lance Creek →
Try the 100-mile radius to see whether a major city falls inside — for Lance Creek, it doesn't, because the nearest qualifying city (Gillette, WY) sits 84 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 Wyoming 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 Wyoming's loneliest. Full methodology on the hub page.
Suggested citation: SimpleMapLab (2026). The Loneliest Towns in America: Wyoming. Part of the Most Remote Inhabited Places study. Retrieved from https://www.simplemaplab.com/studies/most-remote-places/wyoming. CC-BY 4.0.