8 Nevada Ghost Towns That Aren’t Worth the Drive

Nevada has over 600 ghost towns scattered across the state, more than any other state in the country, according to the state’s tourism office.

Not all of them are worth seeing.

These are the Nevada ghost towns that aren’t worth the drive.

1. Wahmonie

Wahmonie never got the chance to become a proper ghost town before the federal government swallowed it whole.

Prospectors found gold on Jackass Flats in February 1928, and within months the camp held somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 people.

The gold played out almost as fast.

Wahmonie’s post office opened in April 1928 and closed 12 months later, and much of the camp packed up right behind it.

Nothing about that would keep Wahmonie off a map, except that the same patch of desert later became part of the Nevada National Security Site, the government’s nuclear testing ground.

A site employee has to invite you and badge you in before you can reach it today.

You can’t just drive up.

2. Fairview

The ghost town of Fairview drew a genuine silver rush in 1906, the kind Nevada built its whole reputation on.

The town hit 2,000 people within a year, with hotels, banks, assay offices, a newspaper, and 27 saloons pouring drinks along a single dusty street.

A 1911 silver mill kept Fairview profitable until 1917, and the state still marks the spot with Historical Marker No. 202 along U.S. Route 50.

Then the boom ended.

Here’s the part the marker doesn’t spell out: A crowd-submitted photo caption claims the townsite now sits inside a Navy bombing range.

That would put Fairview off-limits as government property, closed to the public it once drew by the thousand.

Even setting that claim aside, nothing is left at the site itself beyond scrub and the marker: The hotels, the mill, and all 27 saloons are long gone.

A roadside marker is about as close as anyone gets.

3. Rawhide

Prospectors turned Rawhide into one of the state’s mining boomtowns, then abandoned it almost as fast.

Gold turned up in December 1906, and by the spring of 1908 the population had swelled toward 7,000 people, according to the Nevada Mining Association.

That’s a whole city that showed up in a year and a half.

A fire tore through Rawhide in September 1908, a flood hit the following September, and fewer than 500 people stuck around by late 1910.

Two disasters, one year.

What survived the fire and the flood didn’t survive the 21st century.

Mining historians and enthusiast sites describe a modern open-pit gold and silver operation, the Denton-Rawhide Mine, cutting its pit straight through the old town’s footprint.

Multiple accounts of the site describe nothing recognizable left standing.

Drive out to Rawhide today, and the payoff is an old mine scar.

4. Aurora

Aurora ranked among Nevada’s biggest boomtowns after silver and gold turned up there in August 1860.

Its population reached about 7,000 people by 1864, and nobody was even sure which state it belonged to.

Aurora served as the county seat of both California’s Mono County and Nevada’s Esmeralda County at the same time, until a border survey settled the argument.

Mark Twain tried his hand at mining there and later wrote about the experience in Roughing It.

As Aurora’s shallow veins gave out by 1870, its population crashed to about 500 within a decade.

The bust hit fast.

What was left didn’t get to rot in peace.

Salvage crews tore down Aurora’s brick buildings after World War II to sell the material.

A federal historic survey conducted decades ago already found little beyond rubble, foundations, and a cemetery.

More than 50 years of desert weather haven’t added anything back.

5. St. Thomas

State tourism materials market St. Thomas as the state's drowned city, and the story on the ground is a letdown next to that billing.

Mormon settlers founded the town in 1865, and it grew to roughly 500 residents.

Hoover Dam backed up the Colorado River in the 1930s and buried the town under Lake Mead.

The last resident paddled away from his front door in 1938.

Falling lake levels have exposed St. Thomas several times since, and the site sits above water again today.

The National Park Service describes what's there as building foundations and scattered glass, reached by a shadeless, 2.5-mile round-trip walk the park service itself warns can turn dangerous in the heat.

No walls.

No roofs.

Just knee-high outlines of houses baking in the sun.

6. Wonder

Before it became a ghost town, Wonder had every trapping of a full-fledged boomtown in miniature.

A prospector found gold there in March 1906, and within months the camp had general stores, saloons, a weekly newspaper, telephone lines, and electric power.

A 200-ton cyanide mill kept Wonder running into the 1910s, and the district produced close to $5.8 million in gold and silver before it was through, according to Churchill County's historic sites records.

That's serious money for a town that didn't even last 15 years.

Once the mine closed in 1920, crews took Wonder apart instead of walking away from it.

They hauled the mill and the buildings that could still be moved off to other mining camps.

What's left is scattered foundations spread across a flat between two mountain ranges 55 miles from Fallon.

Somebody else got the town.

7. Palmetto

Prospectors tried to build a town at Palmetto three separate times, and their biggest attempt left nothing behind.

Silver prospectors organized the first camp in 1866, and a stone mill and a handful of stone walls from that era still stand in the Fish Lake Valley today.

Those stone remains are scattered across open Bureau of Land Management land, with no marked trail connecting them and no walkable townsite to explore.

They don't add up to the intact ghost town people tend to picture when they hear about stone walls still standing.

Then came the bigger rush.

By 1906, more than 200 tents lined a commercial street a mile long, according to Nevada mining researchers.

By most accounts, none of that camp was ever permanent.

When the ore ran out a year later, the tents came down, folded up, and left with the people who owned them.

Palmetto's second, bigger act is the one many people drive out expecting to see, and by most accounts it was never built out of anything sturdier than canvas.

8. Osceola

Osceola grew into a proper mining town, then the miners who built it washed much of it away.

Gold turned up there in 1872, and a placer rush built the town past 1,500 people by 1882, according to the National Park Service.

Osceola's owners then spent years chasing more water for the gravel that was left.

A West Ditch went in during 1884 and 1885, and a second, harder ditch across 18 miles of rock wasn't finished until July 4, 1890.

That hydraulic setup let crews blast entire hillsides apart with pressurized water.

Even two ditches never fully solved the site's water problem, and mining had wound down to almost nothing by 1905, per the National Park Service.

The hillside just vanished.

A boomtown built on washing dirt away doesn't leave much of itself standing.

Osceola isn't even fully a relic today.

The National Park Service notes that prospectors still hold active claims on the site, reworking old tailings for whatever gold the original miners missed.

That makes Osceola somebody's job site more than a place to wander.

The Boom-and-Bust Pattern

According to the state's tourism office, the setup behind many of Nevada's abandoned mining camps barely changed from one town to the next.

A strike brought hundreds or thousands of people to a patch of desert with no water, no farmland, and no reason to stay once the ore played out.

The state had almost no other economy to fall back on.

No backup plan.

So when a mine stopped paying, the whole town usually went with it within a year or two, not a slow generational fade like an old farm town back east.

Many of these strikes also started in shallow, easy-to-reach ore that a handful of prospectors could work by hand with picks, pans, and rockers.

Once that shallow ore ran out, getting at what was left usually meant deep shafts, pumps, and mills.

Many mine owners never bothered to raise that kind of money once the easy pickings dried up.

A camp that boomed and busted in three years rarely had time to build anything worth outlasting it.

A century of wind, salvage crews, and later mining has finished the job at many others.

Crews hauled off the machinery first, not the buildings.

Pumps, boilers, and rail track came out of a dead camp's mill before anything else, bound for whatever strike was booming next.