The Best Ghost Towns in Arizona: Copper, Silver, and Route 66

Arizona's ghosts come in two families: the mining towns — copper and silver camps from every range — and the Route 66 casualties, roadside towns the interstate unplugged within a decade. The best trips mix both.

The living ghosts

Jerome is the national model: fifteen thousand people to fifty, then rebirth as an arts town clinging to a 30-degree slope. Oatman pairs Route 66 theater with genuinely wild-ish burros extorting alfalfa on Main Street. Chloride, the state's oldest mining town, hides the astonishing Roy Purcell cliff murals up a rough track.

The true time capsules

Ruby is the best-preserved classic camp in Arizona — schoolhouse desks still in rows — kept that way by private caretakers and a paid permit that funds preservation. Vulture City, Wickenburg's restored gold camp, runs proper tours past the assay office and its infamous hanging tree. Fairbank, ten minutes from Tombstone, gives you a BLM-preserved rail town without Tombstone's crowds.

The desert deep cuts

Swansea asks 25+ dirt miles and pays with adobe worker duplexes and smelter ruins under enormous silence. The Cochise County trio — Gleeson, Courtland, Pearce — makes a perfect gravel loop through the copper-and-turquoise hills. Two Guns and Canyon Diablo, off I-40, stack Route 66 kitsch on top of a genuinely violent railroad past: zoo cages, death caves, and Hell Street's legend.

Arizona rules: summer is an access season in reverse (the low deserts are dangerous by 10 a.m.), most 'roads' on old maps aren't, and half these sites are private or permit-only — every record in the atlas flags which.