The 1990 Western is set on the 1863 frontier and was filmed mostly in South Dakota: a Fort Hays set near Rapid City, the Badlands, the Triple U Buffalo Ranch and Spearfish Canyon. John Dunbar's journey from a frontier fort to a Sioux winter camp is rebuilt from real prairie and canyon.
The route follows the story's order and ends at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, named in the film's epilogue text. Several stops are film sets or private land, so pins mark the nearest real place.
Nomadland follows Fern, a widow who leaves the Nevada gypsum town of Empire in a van, past a desert gathering in Arizona and a campground in South Dakota's Badlands National Park, to the restaurant at Wall Drug and the coast at Point Arena, California.
The route takes the film's places in story order, five stops across four states. The Arizona stop is approximate: the pin marks Quartzsite, where Bob Wells's real nomad gathering is held.
Fargo (1996) is set in Fargo, Brainerd and Moose Lake but was mostly filmed around Minneapolis, from a Richfield dealership and downtown garages to a Square Lake cabin.
The route follows the botched kidnapping from the bar deal to the final arrest, pairing each story place with the site where the Coen brothers shot it; several are demolished or relocated. It ends in Fargo itself, where the wood chipper prop is on show.
Little House in the Big Woods begins in a log cabin near Pepin, Wisconsin, and the Ingalls family goes on to a Kansas prairie, a dugout beside Plum Creek at Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and the Dakota homestead at De Smet. All five homesites survive as cabins, museums or marked sites.
The route follows the books in order: the Wisconsin woods of the early 1870s, the Kansas cabin of 1869–1870, the locust-struck dugout of 1874, the surveyors' house and homestead at De Smet, and finally Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri, where Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the first four books in the Rock House at 65.
In the spring of 2004 Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman set out from London on motorcycles, heading east for New York with cinematographer Claudio von Planta. The ride ran from 14 April to 29 July and crossed twelve countries and 18,887 miles.
The route follows the highlights: a church built of bones in the Czech Republic, a UNICEF project in Mongolia, the mud of the Zilov Gap, the Road of Bones to Magadan, Mount Rushmore and the ride into New York. Pins mark places and areas; the real line of travel ran between them.
In 1960 the novelist John Steinbeck fitted a pickup truck with a camper shell, named it Rocinante and set out from Long Island with his poodle, Charley. He wanted to see his country because he made his living writing about it, and his main question was what Americans are like today.
This route follows eight stops of the outer loop, from Sag Harbor through Maine, Niagara Falls and Minnesota to Montana, Yellowstone and Steinbeck's native Salinas Valley, then down to New Orleans. The book is a novelist's account: it has been challenged as partly fictionalised, so read the encounters as stories and the places as real.
Into the Wild tells the true story of Christopher McCandless: he graduated from Emory University in Atlanta in 1990, paddled the Colorado River into Mexico, worked in Carthage, South Dakota, and in April 1992 walked onto the Stampede Trail outside Healy, Alaska. He died in an abandoned bus that August, aged 24. Jon Krakauer wrote the book in 1996; Sean Penn filmed it in 2007.
The route follows his documented trail. The Stampede Trail is dangerous, and this route is not an invitation to retrace the last part of it.
