Theme

Ghost Towns

11 destinations along 11 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.

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

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.

I-801

Saltair

Magna

A haunting lakeside resort with a storied past

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.

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.

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.

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