If you are planning a trip to Las Vegas and are a fan of ghosts and ghost towns, we have the perfect tour for you. All you are going to have to do is take one day out of your schedule and we will tour you through some of the awesome ghost towns that exist in the desert just outside of Vegas. The majority of these towns have a similar history, coming to life and getting popular due to some form of mining or production that happened in the area, combined with the need for people to work. Some came to these towns to stake their own claim at whatever resource was in demand, others came to work for them. As boom towns grow, others arrive who will provide goods and services for the workers, and generally populations spiked dramatically and sustained until the need for the resources drops off, or the resources are depleted. The bust that follows the boom is what creates the classic ghost town, where crumbling structures remain abandoned in an underpopulated region that once was a functioning town. Ghost towns in the Mojave Desert are unique in that there is not a lot of rain or snow that will cause them to crumble into dust, so the aging process is dramatically slowed down. As a result you will find structures that are over a hundred years old standing in the desert, without upkeep of any kind. The towns are both intriguing and creepy, as though everyone left at once and never came back.
Our ghost town tours from Las Vegas start in the morning with a pickup at local stops and then travel to the Hoover Dam. At the dam you can see one of the most impressive man-made structures on earth, and the expanse of Lake Mead behind it. We go from Hoover Dam to Chloride Arizona. The town came into being in the 1860’s during the Silver Rush, and mines extracted silver and other minerals from the nearby hills. There are currently about 250 residents of Chloride, and they love to talk about their town with us while we eat lunch. We then travel to Oatman Arizona, where wild burros are common, but people are not. There are about 150 people living here along with one ghost who is believed to be a miner who died behind the Oatman Hotel. Theres plenty of retro in Oatman where you can find recreations of cowboys and indians every day. From there we visit El-Dorado Canyon which is as close to a perfect backdrop for your old west photos as you can get. A day of exploring the ruins of once-booming towns in the desert, good food and maybe even a drink or two at an old west saloon make for the perfect day before we return back to Las Vegas, where you can continue your exploration of a different kind of town in the desert, one that will probably never be a ghost town. But who knows……