Credit: The Nature Conservancy

If you’ve ever picked up a copy of the free magazine Blue Ridge Outdoors, you know the Charlottesville-based outfit does a great job covering outdoors-related stories and featuring interesting outdoorsmen and women throughout the Southeast. The April 2012 edition includes the story of a couple whose adventures I thought worth sharing, mostly because they’ve embarked on a mission that’s long rattled around in the back of my brain — at least the Virginia portion of it.

Ryan and Rebecca Means are currently searching for the most remote places in each of the 50 states. Project Remote, as they call it, involves hiking to the spot farthest from a road. It’s a seems like a simple definition of remote, but it turns out to be a good one — and not always an easy one to accomplish. Take Virginia: Our remote spot, actually one of the most remote, by their standard, in the continental U.S., is 8.3 miles from the nearest road on a barrier island in The Nature Conservancy’s Virginia Coast Reserve. To get there the Means family (their three-year-old daughter Skyla accompanies them on every trip) had to take an 18-mile boat ride  before hiking four miles to the spot. Their Virginia adventure features tons of pictures and an insightful blog. It’s worth checking out.