The Best Ghost Towns in California, Desert to Bay

California has buried more boomtowns than any state in the union — Gold Rush camps, desert silver cities, company towns, and stranger experiments. The good news: its best ghost towns are also its best-protected, with state parks doing the preserving.

Start with the park-protected giants

Bodie needs no introduction — 110 buildings in arrested decay, the standard against which every American ghost town is measured. Shasta's brick row outside Redding was the 'Queen City' of the northern mines. North Bloomfield, inside Malakoff Diggins, is where a court order ended hydraulic mining in 1884 — arguably the birthplace of American environmental law. Allensworth preserves the state's first Black-founded town, and its story will outlast most gold camps'.

Then go desert

The Death Valley country holds the wild ones: Ballarat and its lone-prospector legend, Skidoo and its piped water, Panamint City — an outlaw camp Wells Fargo refused to serve — now a hard 5.5-mile hike up Surprise Canyon. Cerro Gordo, the silver mountain that bankrolled young Los Angeles, is privately owned and famously being restored one YouTube episode at a time. Randsburg and Darwin are 'living ghosts' where a few dozen residents keep the story going.

And one you'll never touch

Drawbridge, the Bay Area's own ghost town, is sinking into the marsh inside a wildlife refuge south of Fremont — visible from the Amtrak window, illegal to enter, and better for it. Llano del Rio's socialist-colony ruins on the Pearblossom Highway make the perfect philosophical bookend: California kills utopias too.

Distances deceive in this state — Bodie and Ballarat are five hours apart. Build trips around regions (Eastern Sierra, Death Valley, Gold Country, the southern deserts) and check seasonal access; Bodie's road closes with snow and the desert camps close with heat.