When you book a trip to Las Vegas, you are probably thinking about gambling, glittering lights and showgirls. Las Vegas has always been a wonder of achievement of what people can do if they set their minds to it, essentially changing a place from a desolate desert area to one of the biggest tourist towns on earth. Through modern inventions like indoor plumbing, air conditioning and running water Las Vegas is no longer a difficult place to live or visit like it once was, nor is it a stopover town where you can re-supply on your way to somewhere else. Las Vegas is now a destination on it’s own, and people come from all over the world to see what man can do with enough effort. But if you really want to get a sense about Las Vegas as an area, as well as the history of the region, a tour of some of the ghost towns that surround it is fascinating. Ghost towns of the southwestern United States have a similar history as Las Vegas does, essentially having large amounts of people moving to it in order to seek their piece of some fortune. For much of the abandoned towns of the southwest, that fortune was the silver rush that happened in the mid to late 1800’s, where people looking for their fortune packed up their things and relocated to the mountains of the southwest seeking silver or other natural minerals that could be extracted from the ground. Mining towns grew quickly when word spread that a resource like silver or gold had been discovered, and disappeared just as quickly when the mines went dry or the demand for the resource went away. Because there is not a lot of water in the desert to destroy buildings, the classic ghost towns exist in the middle of nowhere, with crumbling structures sitting in the middle of nothing. The history is kept alive by locals that continue to inhabit the regions, and the tourist money that is spent there. Our one-day tour of the ghost towns of the southwest is one that will leave you wanting more as well as better educated on the history that formed our current areas.
Our ghost town tours from Las Vegas start in the morning with local pickups from hotels and meeting points, before traveling to the Hoover Dam where we stop for pictures and learn the history of one of the greatest man-made structures on earth. We move from there to Chloride Arizona, where a population of 250 locals continue to tell the story of the mining town that flourished before becoming nearly completely abandoned. We visit Oatman where wild burros roam the streets and a spirit of a miner who died behind the Oatman Hotel is still active today. Have a drink in the old west saloon before we are off to explore El-Dorado Canyon and Route 66. We head back to Las Vegas from there, where you can tell your friends about all the ghosts you saw, and history you learned.