Mining Boom
The West's mountains held fortunes, and the rushes to dig them built and abandoned whole towns in a generation. Nevada's Comstock Lode, the first great silver strike of 1859, threw up Virginia City almost overnight, helped fund San Francisco and bring Nevada into the Union, then emptied to a near-ghost town in twenty years. Utah had its own: silver at Park City, the vast open copper pit at Bingham. The ore came out by Cornish, Irish, and Chinese hands, on land that was Numu and Shoshone home. What's left is the boom's long echo: headframes, tailings, and ghost towns.
CR-21
US-21
I-5 / US-501
US-61
Placerita Canyon Rd., off CA-141
I-15 (Ghost Town Road exit)1
I-15/I-902
SR-181
SR-211
WY-241
I-251
US-261
WY-281
CA-491
CA-49 / CA-201
CA-49 / Parrotts Ferry Road1
Tyler Foote Crossing Road (off CA-49)1
US-503
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
Ely
The copper town and crossroads at the east end of the loneliest road — home of the Ghost Train and the gateway to Great Basin
Eureka
The Pittsburgh of the West, reborn — the best-preserved town on the loneliest road, with an 1880 opera house and a working 1879 courthouse
Oatman Highway (Historic Route 66)1
I-702
Georgetown Loop Railroad
Scrapped in 1939 for $450, rebuilt a century after it first opened, and running again over the bridge that crosses its own track.
Hotel de Paris
A French cook's hotel in a silver town, kept for twenty-five years by a man whose name turned out not to be his own.
I-70 / US-1911
SR-75; Yankee Fork Road1
Silver City Road, off SR-78 near Murphy1
I-802
Carlin & the Carlin Trend
The small railroad town west of Elko that sits beside the largest gold complex on earth — and, because the gold is invisible, shows you almost none of it.
Elko
The railroad built it, cattle made it, and gold keeps it — the working capital of northeast Nevada, a frontier cow town that never got around to becoming a relic.
SR-802
CO-821
US-841
SR-89 / SR-691
SR-89A1
I-90, exit 54 (Big Creek)1
US-932
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.
Ward Charcoal Ovens
Six great stone beehives in the Egan Range — the best-preserved charcoal kilns in Nevada, and the intact relic of the fuel that fed every silver smelter
US-952
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.
Tonopah
The Queen of the Silver Camps — the 1900 strike that saved Nevada, and the one boom town that never became a ghost: a mine you can walk into, a grand hotel, a clown motel, and the darkest skies in America.
SR-97 at Harrison; I-90 at Kellogg and Wallace1
Davison Road, off US-101 north of Orick1
UT-1111
CO-1191
NM-1521
US-1911
UT-2101
UT-2242
OR-2381
CA-270 (off US-395)1
MT-2781
US-2851
MT-2871
MT-3081
NV-3412
Chollar Mine
A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
Virginia City
The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
US-5502
Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad
Steam to Silverton up the Animas since 1882, and the coal-fired locomotive cinder that federal investigators blamed for the 416 Fire of 2018.
Red Mountain Mining District
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.