The Best Ghost Towns in Nevada, From Easy to Earn-It

Nevada is the ghost-town state: by most counts it holds more abandoned towns than inhabited ones, because almost every settlement here was built on a vein that eventually quit. Our survey layer records 1,920 vanished or historical sites in Nevada alone. That's not a list you work through — it's a landscape you choose from, so choose by how hard you want to work.

Easy: pavement and parking

Rhyolite, outside Beatty, is the best easy ghost town in the state — three-story bank ruins, the famous Bottle House, and Death Valley next door. Goldfield, right on US-95, was Nevada's biggest city in 1906 and still holds court in its stone courthouse; the hotel looms over the highway like a dare. Berlin, inside Berlin–Ichthyosaur State Park, adds giant marine-reptile fossils to a preserved mining camp — the strangest double feature in Nevada.

Moderate: graded gravel

Belmont's brick courthouse rises out of Monitor Valley sagebrush at the end of a mostly-paved run from Tonopah. Unionville, where Mark Twain failed at mining for two weeks, hides in a green canyon south of I-80. St. Thomas, drowned by Lake Mead in 1938 and resurfaced by drought, is a flat, haunting walk on a dirt access road near Overton.

Earn-it: clearance, planning, and nerve

Hamilton — twelve thousand people at 8,000 feet, for about three years — asks for eleven miles of rough dirt west of Ely and pays in solitude. Delamar, 'The Widowmaker,' keeps its terraced stone mills behind thirty miles of Lincoln County desert. Jarbidge, in the far north, is a hundred-mile gravel commitment to one of the last gold-rush towns in America — bring a full tank and a bar appetite.

Every one of these has a full record in the atlas — dates, stories, access notes, and what's actually standing. Start with the state map, filter by what your vehicle can honestly do, and remember the Nevada rule: the emptier the road, the better the town.