Which U.S. states are completely disconnected, so that some part of the state cannot be reached without...

trivia/disconnected.states New

New entry, edited from material collected for the archive and not yet in a released version.

Problem

Which U.S. states are completely disconnected, so that some part of the
state cannot be reached without travelling through a neighboring state?

I can think of at least two states that are completely disconnected.
No matter how you travel (by boat, by air, by swimming, etc.) there is a
part of the state that you cannot reach without travelling through some
neighboring state.

-- Dave Seaman <ags@seaman.cc.purdue.edu>

[ Editor: the first sentence is the editor's; the quoted posting is
Seaman's original statement. ]

Show solution

No new states were found to have the property of geographical
disconnectedness, other than the two I had in mind when I posted the
puzzle:

David Moews (dmoews@xraysgi.ims.uconn.edu) posted one part of the
solution:

>1.  Just south of New Madrid, MO, there is a bit of Kentucky that
>fulfills your conditions; it shares a land boundary with Tennessee and
>a water boundary with Missouri.

Mark Brader (msb@sq.com) sent me the other answer I was looking for by
email.  Ellis Island and Liberty Island in New York harbor are
considered to be part of the state of New York, but they are completely
surrounded by New Jersey waters.  Maps clearly show the boundary running
through the middle of the harbor, well to the east of both islands.

Interestingly, Mark Brader mailed me this from Toronto, thus putting to
shame all the U.S. readers who failed to identify the Statue of Liberty
as part of a disconnected state.

-- Dave Seaman <ags@seaman.cc.purdue.edu>  (April 1996)