Does Size Matter?

Here are some facts, figures and comparisons to help your mind grasp the size of where we're living and to fully understand the meaning of "sparsely populated". Apologies to those readers unfamiliar with Northern California towns.

The Northern Territory is a bit more than 3 times the physical size of California. Another way to think about it is to fuse California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona into one massive state. For my European friends, that is slightly larger than the land areas of Spain, Italy and France combined.

Okay, have you got those 525,000 square miles of landscape spread across your mind?

Now put the population of Butte County onto that space. The entire population of the Northern Territory is close to 200,000 (slightly less than Butte County, actually). As you scatter those people across those three Californias in your mind, you are giving each person a couple of square miles. (In contrast, Butte County has a density of over 100 people per square mile.)

But you know that’s not how people live, don’t you? There are cities, towns, population centers. The three biggest settlements in Northern Territory are Darwin, Alice Springs, and Katherine. Darwin has about 100,000 people—roughly the size of the greater Chico area. Alice Springs has 28,000 people—a bit larger than the town of Paradise. I live in the third largest town, Katherine, which has somewhere between 7500 and 9000 people—bigger than Gridley, smaller than Red Bluff.

So, have you got that? A space as big as California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona combined. The biggest city is about the size of Chico, the next biggest city (town!) is slightly larger than Paradise. The only other sizeable town is smaller than Red Bluff. The remaining 63,000 people are scattered over the rest of this vast territory in settlements that range from small to tiny.

By the way, Darwin and Alice Springs are 889 miles apart. That’s slightly more than Redding to Yuma, Arizona (Eureka to San Diego is only 765 miles). Katherine is located on the highway between the two “big” cities: it is 200 miles south of Darwin and 700 miles north of Alice Springs.

For my brother who said, “It’s like you’re living in Weed, California,” here’s a better comparison:

We’re living in a small Red Bluff and the big city of Chico is about as far away as Merced. The other “big city”—comparable to Paradise—is a little bit further away than Salt Lake City. The rest of California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona is populated only with the residents of Davis, spread out over the land.

And you thought the American west was wide-open and sparsely populated....