Faro

Faro was built almost overnight in the 1960s for the Anvil Range mine, once one of the largest lead-zinc operations in the world, and the town still carries the ghost of that ambition — wide suburban streets, a rec center, cul-de-sacs laid out for ten thousand people that maybe four hundred now occupy. Driving in from the Campbell Highway, you notice the grid before you notice how quiet it is. Lia said it felt like a movie set built for a much bigger production that got cancelled halfway through.

We’d come specifically for the Fannin sheep, a pale, almost cream-colored subspecies found in real numbers almost nowhere else on earth, grazing the mountains that ring the old mine site. A local guide took us up toward Mount Mye where the sheep come down to graze the mineral licks in early summer, and within an hour we had a band of them in the spotting scope, unbothered, working their way along a scree face like it was nothing.

Back in town we ate at the one diner still open, and the owner talked us through the mine’s closures and restarts over the decades — it shut for good in the late nineties, reopened briefly, shut again — and how the town had shrunk each time and never quite recovered its old size. There’s an interpretive display near the visitor center with photos of the open pit at full production, trucks the size of houses, that made the current silence feel almost staged.

What stuck with me leaving Faro wasn’t the mine story, which is common enough across the north, but the sheep-viewing infrastructure the community built around what was left — trained volunteer guides, a small festival each June, real pride in something that has nothing to do with ore. It’s a town that got handed decline and found something else worth showing people instead of just closing the door.

When to go: Visit in June for the Faro Wildlife and Wilderness Viewing Festival, when the Fannin sheep are most reliably visible on the slopes near town and local guides are on hand.