The Basque Hills of southeast Oregon lie a trillion miles to the east of nowhere. That’s just an estimate, of course, but reaching them requires hours of driving across gravel roads followed by more hours of bouncing along faint two-track ruts across the desert of southeast Oregon.
After that, a hike through an unremarkable landscape of sagebrush, more sagebrush and ever more sagebrush finally offers something hard to find in the modern age: solitude. That, and quiet.
Data suggest the quiet is not just an illusion. A model developed by Dr. Daniel Mennitt, in partnership with the research firm, Ambient Logic and the National Park Service, predicted that Oregon’s Basque Hills region often approaches something close to absolute silence.
“We acquired all sorts of data describing roads, developed land use and the built environment in general,” Mennitt said. “Perhaps the strongest indicator of human activity in this situation came from satellite data describing the upward radiance and light at night.”
In other words, the farther you are from people and their lights, the quieter it is. Harney County, home to the Basque Hills and populated by an average of just one person per square mile, fits the bill. In 2024, this part of Oregon was named the world’s largest International Dark Sky Sanctuary.
The crew of OPB’s “Oregon Field Guide” traveled to the Basque Hills with sound recording artist Nick McMahan to ground-truth the data and record the sounds of nature and the trickier-to-record sounds of silence.
Our assessment? If there is any quieter spot on Earth, it’s unlikely human ears could tell the difference. Silence-seekers rejoice! But please, do so quietly.