Theme

Ghost Towns

28 destinations along 27 roads

Not every ghost town died the same way, and not all of them are entirely dead. Most followed the ore — copper at Jerome, silver at Pioche and Austin, gold at Goldfield and Rhyolite — boom to bust inside a generation. But Saltair was a lakeshore resort, and Thistle drowned under a 1983 landslide, not a market crash. And "ghost" runs a spectrum: Austin and Goldfield still hold a few hundred stubborn residents, Berlin sits in deliberate "arrested decay," Rhyolite is bare stone. What empties a Western town is rarely just the mine giving out.

CR-21

Animas Forks

Silverton

A silver camp at 11,200 feet where the Animas River's three forks meet, with the 1879 Duncan house and its bay window still standing on the Alpine Loop.

W. Pico Canyon Rd., off I-51

Mentryville and Pico Canyon

Newhall

A company town in a canyon, and a mile and a half further up the road, the well that started the California oil industry.

I-15 (Ghost Town Road exit)1

Calico Ghost Town

Yermo

An 1881 silver boomtown in the calico-colored hills, saved and rebuilt by the founder of Knott's Berry Farm.

SR-181

Doble

Big Bear City

Three men with money reopened this mine and all three failed. The town is named after the second one.

WY-281

South Pass City State Historic Site

Lander

The Carissa lode built the town in a year; the mine outlived the boom by eight decades, and its mill runs again for visitors.

US-501

Austin

A silver boomtown that hit ten thousand and fell to under two hundred — the living ghost town at the high middle of US-50

Historic Route 66 (National Old Trails Road)1

Goffs

Essex

A near-ghost on the pre-1931 Route 66 alignment, keeper of a 1914 desert schoolhouse and a WWII Army camp.

Historic Route 66 (National Trails Highway)1

Amboy

Roy's Motel and Cafe and its 1959 neon boomerang, the most photographed lonely stop on Route 66.

Oatman Highway (Historic Route 66)1

Oatman

A gold camp in the Black Mountains that outlived its mines, now run by wild burros — reached by the wildest switchbacks left on Route 66, and named for a history worth telling straight.

SR-75; Yankee Fork Road1

Yankee Fork Gold Dredge

Stanley

A 988-ton floating gold dredge worked five miles of valley for twelve years, and spent more than it found.

Silver City Road, off SR-78 near Murphy1

Silver City

Murphy

An Owyhee silver camp that faded but never quite emptied, still lit by twelve-volt bulbs.

I-802

Metropolis

Wells

A planned farm city with a brick hotel and street lights, undone by a lawsuit from farmers at the far end of the same river.

Saltair

Magna

A haunting lakeside resort with a storied past

CO-821

Independence Pass

Aspen

Crossed by prospectors on the Fourth of July 1879, opened as a toll road for the Aspen rush in 1881, and shut by snow half of every year since.

SR-89A1

Jerome

Cottonwood

The billion-dollar copper camp clinging to Cleopatra Hill — now the largest ghost town in America

US-89 / US-61

Thistle Landslide

Spanish Fork

The ruins of a town destroyed by a massive landslide in 1983

US-931

Pioche

The silver camp that, by legend, out-killed the Old West — Boot Hill's boots-on graves, the graft-ridden Million-Dollar Courthouse, and an aerial tramway still slung over Main Street.

US-951

Goldfield

Once the largest city in Nevada, now a few hundred souls — the purest boom-and-bust in the West, with a castle courthouse still in use, a grand hotel dark since the war, and a desert full of upended cars.

UT-1281

Cisco

Moab

A railroad-and-oil ghost town at the east end of UT-128, later a backdrop for "Thelma & Louise"

NV-2251

Jarbidge

The end of the road, twice over — Nevada's most isolated town, deep in a canyon on the Idaho line, where the West's last gold rush and its last stagecoach robbery both played out.

CA-270 (off US-395)1

Bodie State Historic Park

Bridgeport

A gold town of ten thousand left exactly as it emptied, held in arrested decay at 8,375 feet.

MT-2781

Bannack State Park

Dillon

The first capital's second life: a county seat lost to the railroad, a courthouse turned hotel, a town that emptied slowly.

US-2851

South Park City Museum

Fairplay

A mining town assembled in the 1950s from buildings hauled out of South Park's dying camps, by a Colorado Springs lawyer who wanted no imitation town.

MT-2871

Virginia City

A gold camp one couple began buying in 1944, and the state bought from their family in 1997.

NV-374 / US-951

Rhyolite

Beatty

The most complete ghost town in Nevada — a stone city with an opera house and a marble-stepped bank that rose and died inside a decade, now the most photographed ruin in the West.

US-5501

Red Mountain Mining District

Ouray

Three iron-red peaks above Red Mountain Pass, the 1882 Yankee Girl and its headframe, and a boom town that went up in five weeks in 1883.

SR-8441

Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park

Gabbs

A gold camp frozen in "arrested decay" since 1911, beside a quarry of fifty-foot ichthyosaurs left in the rock where they died — the Silver Trails' long exhale into deep time.

Bridge Lane1

Grafton Ghost Town

Rockville

A photogenic ghost town used in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid