Nevada · Ghost town
Rhyolite
A gold town that went from nothing to thousands and back inside a decade, on the eastern edge of Death Valley.
Position Nye County, Nevada · 36.9039, -116.8292
Rhyolite began in early 1905 as one of several camps thrown up after a prospecting strike in the Bullfrog Hills. The rush that followed brought thousands of prospectors, developers and the people who sell things to prospectors and developers, and for a few years it behaved like a real city.
It sits in Nye County about a hundred and twenty miles northwest of Las Vegas, right against the eastern boundary of Death Valley National Park, which is how most visitors reach it now.
The surviving structures are concrete and stone rather than timber, which is why they are still standing: bank facades, a school, a railway depot, and a house built out of bottles. Concrete outlasts a boom in a way that wood does not.
Combine it with Death Valley rather than driving out specially. In summer the heat here is the same murderous heat as the park next door.
Facts checked against the Wikipedia article Rhyolite, Nevada. The words above are ours.