Goldfield — Nevada | Shared Latitude

A once-booming gold town that shrank from twenty thousand people to a few hundred almost overnight, leaving behind a grand courthouse and a three-story hotel that both still stand defiantly among empty lots. Lia and I wandered the International Car Forest just outside town at sunset, dozens of cars planted nose-down in the dirt like a fever dream.

Goldfield is a town that peaked in about 1907 and has been quietly, stubbornly existing ever since. At its height it was Nevada’s largest city, boasting twenty thousand residents, its own stock exchange, and electric lights before many parts of San Francisco had them, all fueled by one of the richest gold strikes in American history. Then the ore thinned out, and within a decade most of that population had simply left. What remains — a population under three hundred now — feels less like a ghost town and more like a city that got interrupted mid-sentence, its grandest buildings still standing among empty lots and collapsed foundations.

The courthouse and the Goldfield Hotel

The Esmeralda County Courthouse still functions, an ornate building with a domed cupola that looks wildly out of scale for a town this small, a holdover from when Goldfield genuinely expected to matter for a century. Across the street the Goldfield Hotel, three stories of brick grandeur, has sat mostly empty for decades, its reputation for hauntings now doing more business than the hotel itself ever managed. We peered through dusty windows at a lobby frozen somewhere around 1910 — chandeliers, a curved staircase, furniture nobody’s bothered or dared to move.

The ornate brick facade of the historic Goldfield Hotel in Goldfield, Nevada

The International Car Forest of the Last Church

A few minutes outside town, in a stretch of open desert, dozens of cars have been planted nose-first or tail-first into the ground, their spray-painted bodies rusting in rows like some off-grid sculpture park nobody officially sanctioned. It’s called the International Car Forest of the Last Church, and it started with a single local artist before other painters and travelers kept adding to it. We climbed over a school bus half-buried in sand as the light went orange, and it was, without question, the strangest and most memorable half hour of the whole Nevada trip.

Old cars planted vertically in the desert ground, spray-painted and rusting, at the Car Forest near Goldfield, Nevada

Getting There

Goldfield sits on US-95, about three hours north of Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International Airport (LAS), or roughly 30 minutes south of Tonopah if you’re linking the two ghost towns together. A car is essential — there’s no other way in — and it’s worth fueling up before you go, since services thin out fast in this stretch of central Nevada.