In the USA, we have long referred to the lands of our West as the "wide open spaces". By that, we mean they contain vast areas of open landscape with very few human inhabitants. They are true wilderness country.
Visiting New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago or Los Angeles, you will see only very densely populated and congested areas. Indeed, those parts of our country are not "wide open spaces". Much of the East Coast, most of the Gulf Coast, parts of the West Coast and most areas surrounding our major cities are heavily populated with sprawling suburban communities. Tourists that visit only those areas can easily believe that there are no longer any wide open spaces in the USA. That would be a mistaken impression.
The Western states of Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, Texas and a few others contain some extremely vast areas with very minute populations. The state of Wyoming has a landmass approximately the size of the United Kingdom with less than one percent of the population. Most of Wyoming's inhabitants occupy a few widely-scattered cities and towns leaving huge areas of wide open spaces.
I have traveled across southern Utah driving along a major highway where I saw no more than one or two other vehicles every hour. I passed many side roads that wandered into the surrounding hills. Their dirt surfaces were undisturbed by any signs of traffic other than a few animal tracks. One could easily drive into the wilderness and not be found for weeks. These are wide open spaces.
In Escalante Park, I traveled nearly thirty miles down a dirt track and saw not a single vehicle nor any trace of another human. I recalled that a lone hiker was stranded while exploring one of the many slot canyons in this area. His hand became trapped under a boulder, and he waited nearly a week te be rescued. No one found him. He finally managed to free himself by cutting off his own hand, then he had to hike nearly six miles before other hikers found him. These are definitely wide open spaces.
Last October, Steve Fossett, the world renown aviator, baloonist and adventurer, took off in a small airplane from a ranch in Nevada. He never returned. It is assumed that his plane crashed, so an ariel search was quicly begun. They never located him or the wreckage of his aircraft. His friends mounted a massive volunteer reconnaisance using satellite images. They managed to spot the wreckage of five aircraft never before seen. None of them were Steve Fossett. Some had been missing for thirty or forty years and were just discovered in the last few months! Now, that is real wilderness!
How can a land be so wild that airplanes can disappear and not be found for forty years? This part of the USA that lies in eastern California and Nevada is known as the basin and range country. It is a geologically tortured landscape that has been twisted and fractured by seismic forces for millenia. The area has nearly one thousand mountain ranges arrayed in nearly parellel lines running north and south. Some of the ranges are only a few kilometes long. Others stretch for hundreds of kilometers.
This mountainous landscape lies in the great rain-shadow desert east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The peaks are typically composed of barren exposed rocks, devoid of trees, scantly covered with widely-scattered desert shrubbery and cactus. The valleys between the mountains are filled with flat expanses of sand and gleaming white salt deposits. Dry canyons, ravines and empty riverbeds carve its surfaces into barren labyrinths.
Las Vegas is situated in one of these flat desert valleys artificially made fertile via massive irrigation with imported water. Death Valley is situated in another one of these valleys, that retains its original dry barren beauty. There are a thousand more valleys similar to Death Valley throughout the basin and range country. This is really the epitome of the wide open spaces.