Theme

Ghost Towns

15 destinations along 15 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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