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The One Minute Geographer: COVID Impacts on Nooks and Crannies on the US-Canada Border

Jim Fonseca
2 min readDec 11, 2021
Residents of Hyder, Alaska protest COVID border-crossing restrictions. Photo from krbd.org

Boundaries are funny things. Here are three examples of odd situations along the US-Canada boundary caused by lines on maps. In all three cases, these ‘quaint,’ relatively unknown communities hit the news because of hardships caused by COVID regulations on border-crossings.

Hyder, Alaska (photo above, map below) is a tiny settlement of 50 people where the only access to civilization is past the border crossing to the town of of Stewart, British Columbia (a metropolis of 500 people). Only one road leads in or out of Hyder; all the others end in wilderness.

Hyder, Alaska on the Salmon River. Map from USGS.gov. Red lines added by the author.

Point Roberts in Washington state is cut off from direct land access to the rest of the USA by the 49th parallel of latitude that is the US-Canada border. The economy of the town of about 1,500 residents is largely based on tourism from Canada. They too have had a heck of a time surviving with COVID regulations. Older kids take buses across the border to schools in Blaine.

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Jim Fonseca
Jim Fonseca

Written by Jim Fonseca

Geography professor (retired) writes The One Minute Geographer featuring This Fragile Earth. Top writer in Transportation and, in past months, Travel.

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