Ghost towns are places where time lingers a little longer. Relics of forgotten worlds. Across the American West, hundreds remain. These abandoned settlements were born from dreams of gold, silver timber and opportunity. Families uprooted their lives and crossed mountain ranges, believing they were building communities that would endure, only to discover that the resources would not last. Some towns were nearly empty within just a generation.
What remains are standing structures that continue to bear witness. Crumbling floorboards, weathered churches, silent school houses, and boardwalks worn smooth by boots that would never return. Resilient native flora and fauna – coyotes, rattlesnakes, vultures, sagebrush – have quietly reclaimed these echoes of once thriving pockets of civilization. Nature rarely abandons what humans leave behind. Time didn’t erase these places. It transformed them.
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Landscape Palette
aged cedar, weathered pine, pine resin, birch tar, dry earth, dust carried on a soft breeze, warm granite, vetiver, patchouli, sagebrush, piñon pine, juniper, bay laurel, birch, campfire embers, petrichor and ozone after a summer storm, coal smoke, lavender, helichrysum, chamomile, yarrow, benzoin, myrrh, labdanum, black tea, sun-dried hay, worn leather, beeswax, old paper, citrus peel, coffee gone cold, burlap grain sacks, vanillin, forged steel, hot iron
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Places to Wander
California
- Ballarat
- Old Shasta
- Calico
- Bodie
Oregon
- Golden
- Whitney
- Sumpter
- Shaniko
- Hardman
Montana
- Bannack
- Virginia City
- Nevada City