Looking for Peace and Quiet? California's Got Plenty
The National Park Service has a lot of departments, and one of them is the Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division. The work they do is fascinating. Their bold mission, according to their site, is "to restore, maintain, and protect acoustical environments and naturally dark skies throughout the National Park System." One of the ways they're working towards this goal is through the massive undertaking of figuring out the locations of all that noise.
To figure this out, they planted a bunch of microphones throughout the country, compiled upwards of 1.5 million hours of acoustic monitoring, and used an algorithm to determine where the noisiest and loudest parts of the U.S. are located. Here are their very pretty results:
As you can see, if you're looking for peace and quiet in California, you're going to want to steer clear from the two big metropolitan hubs of L.A. and the Bay Area. The Central Valley area apparently isn't great for solace either. But check out those coastlines, the stretch of desert towards Las Vegas, or the tranquility of Northern California. At the very least, most of us have the good fortune of having quite a bit of quiet within driving distance, as opposed to those unlucky folks back East. Use this information wisely, Wanderers.
