Every fall for the past eight years, my dad, brother and I have taken road trips up and down the Owens Valley along California’s Highway 395, discovering all of the history the region has to offer.

Ghost towns emerged during the 19th century as communities that had been built around mining camps, railroad hubs, and boomtowns fueled by gold rushes. These settlements popped seemingly overnight, ...

Tucked away in the Sierra Nevada, Bodie isn’t just a ghost town—it’s a perfectly preserved time capsule of the Wild West. Once booming with gold miners and outlaws, it now stands eerily silent, ...

BODIE, Calif. — During a long-ago summer of wandering the Western U.S. in a woefully underpowered 1971 VW bus, we were camped in Yosemite Valley when learning of an exceptional ghost town on the ...

A heavy snowstorm in 1859 killed the town’s founder and harsh winters continue to plague the California ghost town Bodie State Historic Park. The former gold-mining settlement, some 300 miles east of ...