I lived in America's least-visited state — there's one thing Brits will never understand

Whenever I meet an American I’m always keen to tell them: “I used to live there!”

“Oh, whereabouts?” they always say, politely ignoring the fact that 300 million other people can also say the same thing.

And when I then tell them where I used to live, their next question is always: “Why?”

It’s not surprising really, because I used to live in the least-visited state in the USA. Fewer people live in the entire state than in an average-sized UK city despite the fact that it is twice the size of Scotland.

It’s not just empty though. It’s also absolutely freezing. It’s the sort of cold that British people can’t really understand. The sort of cold that if you poured water out of an upstairs window it would shatter on the ground as ice. That’s the winter anyway. In the summer, it’s hotter than it will ever get in Britain.

I know what you’re thinking: this place can’t be real, I’m making it up. Well, I’m not. North Dakota is very real — and very unique. It should be far better-known than it is. Sure, other places get life-threateningly cold and other places get painfully hot. But not that many places get both extremes, while also being mostly empty, made up largely of prairie, of small towns, ghost towns and of roads where there are as many cars abandoned upside down in snow drifts at the side of the road as there are driving on it the right way up.

It’s a truly remarkable place. I only lived there six months, a long time ago, but it will always be part of me. In another life, I can picture myself living there happily, spending the winters fishing through ice several feet thick that I’ve just drilled through with an industrial-sized drill which I’ve carried there on my huge pick-up truck, which is also parked next to me on the lake (yes, actually on the lake). Then I’d spend the summers watching cowboys on horseback lasso livestock at small town rodeos and eating corn dogs at county fairs.

I was lucky (yes, lucky) that I was there during a winter of seriously low temperatures. Even North Dakotans were shocked at how cold it was. It hit -44°F (-42°C) in January. For context, in The Worst Journey in the World, the 1922 memoir by Apsley Cherry-Garrard of Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole in, he says the temperatures they dealt with ranged from -40°F (-40°C) to -70°F (-57°C) .

Just a few months later, in the same place, I took a picture of my car’s thermometer showing a temperature of 117°F (47°C). In fact, North Dakota’s low and high temperature records both came in the same year, when it reached -60°F (-51°C) in February 1936 then hit 121°F (49°C) five months later (that’s a temperature swing of 180°F or 100°C in five months).

In the 21st century, of course, even in temperatures this extreme I was never at risk. I could rely on heating, air conditioning, a car, house, phone and even the odd petrol station. But this was once the American frontier, where people came on foot or on wagons pulled by horses or oxen, sold on the American dream and looking for a small square of land they’d bought and now had to find, somewhere in this vast wilderness, to build their home out of whatever they could find.

And even in the 21st century, I was the only person I ever saw walking anywhere outside, with the odd person stopping to ask me if I was OK even though I was just walking along the pavement.

In 2025, North Dakota has one of the USA’s fastest-growing populations, with around 800,000 people now living there. A growing oil industry is partly responsible. But it was way fewer when I lived there, when it had the distinction of being the USA’s least-visited state. Even with the relative population boom, it is still one of America's least-populated states, with around 11 people to every square mile (the UK has 745 people per square mile).

But even if the extreme weather and isolation is the thing that stands out the most, there is so much I remember vividly about my time in North Dakota. I visited abandoned towns, including one which was the subject of a local rumour that members of the military from the major air base nearby took enormously long detours to avoid going anywhere near because it had been taken over by devil-worshippers (which it had not been as far as I could tell).

I went to rodeos, county fairs, Native American reservations and retraced the steps of the famous American explorers Lewis and Clark, who travelled from St Louis to the Pacific Ocean via North Dakota in the early 19th century, documenting the vast area of land the United States had just acquired in the Louisiana Purchase.

I walked in the Badlands where bison roamed free around me and am convinced to this day I had a lucky escape from some wolves who either didn’t see me or decided for some reason not to try to eat me.

I walked the shores of the enormous Lake Sakakawea, which is not far off the size of Greater London, and I wandered into tiny bars in tiny towns miles from anywhere and talked to strangers who were never anything other than friendly, gentle and welcoming. One group of people even came racing across the snow on their snow ploughs (like a jet ski for snow) when I got my car stuck in a drift.

The most famous thing to come out of North Dakota is probably the film (and the subsequent series) Fargo, which is named after the state’s biggest town. But I think it should be famous for so much more.