Wisconsin Death Trip has been a cult book favorite since the 1970s, with its juxtaposition of great black-and-white photography with tales of woe and destruction in the distant forests of central Wisconsin. Wifey and I have both fallen in love with the film adaptation, too. Despite accusations of historical infidelity, the book remains haunting, but the title doesn’t really jive for me. It has a very psychadelic 70s sound to it, which doesn’t hurt its purpose, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. So, I went online looking for anything to explain it, and if any other states have death trips of their own. Everything I found seemed to point back to this book as the source of the term, and a few states have a pretty solid following for their own localized version of the term. Math geeks, here’s some chart porn for you, below the fold:
“(State) Death Trip”, according to the number of Google results.
| Wisconsin (1,010,000) |  / (lots) / |
| Illinois (8,830) | |
| Texas (7,930) | |
| California (5,960) | |
| Kansas (5,930) | |
| New York (3,740) | |
| Michigan (2,730) | |
| Colorado (2,470) | |
| Iowa (862) | |
| Pennsylvania (557) | |
| Massachusetts (382) | |
| Indiana (286) | |
| Arizona (150) | |
| Minnesota (125) | |
| Tennessee (92) | |
| Connecticut (39) | |
| Oklahoma (9) | |
| Wyoming (9) | |
| Alaska (8) | |
| Louisiana (8) | |
| Montana (7) | |
| Washington (7) | |
| Idaho (6) | |
| Nevada (6) | |
| Florida (5) | |
| Virginia (5) | |
| Kentucky (4) | |
| Nebraska (4) | |
| New Jersey (4) | |
| Oregon (4) | |
| Ohio (3) | |
| West Virginia (3) | |
| Alabama (2) | |
| Georgia (2) | |
| New Mexico (2) | |
| Maine (1) | |
| Mississippi (1) | |
| Missouri (1) | |
| North Carolina (1) | |
| Utah (1) | |
| Vermont (1) | |
| Arkansas (0) | |
| Delaware (0) | |
| Hawaii (0) | |
| Maryland (0) | |
| New Hampshire (0) | |
| North Dakota (0) | |
| Rhode Island (0) | |
| South Carolina (0) | |
| South Dakota (0) | |
