Montana is ghost town country. No state in the lower 48 has a higher concentration of abandoned mining towns per square mile, and with 78 documented abandoned places on the Urbex Maps atlas, the Treasure State delivers exactly what that nickname promises: a landscape littered with the remains of gold, silver, copper, and lead booms that swept through the Rocky Mountain West between the 1860s and the early 20th century. This is the state where the territorial capital was a gold rush camp that hit 10,000 people and then emptied almost as fast. Where an entire town collapsed in a single night when the Panic of 1893 killed silver prices. Where mining camps at 7,000 feet elevation were built with full expectations of permanence and abandoned within 20 years when the ore ran out or the economics shifted.
Montana's ghost towns are different from abandoned places in other states because so many of the original structures survive. The dry mountain climate, the remoteness of the sites, and the absence of subsequent development have preserved wooden buildings that would have rotted or been demolished decades ago in wetter or more populated states. Walking through Garnet or Bannack or Elkhorn, you're not looking at foundations and interpretive signs. You're walking past intact saloons, hotels, miners' cabins, and stamp mills with their machinery still inside. The quality of preservation is extraordinary, and it's the reason Montana's ghost towns attract photographers and history enthusiasts from around the world.
This guide covers 6 of the most iconic abandoned places in Montana, with free GPS coordinates on the Urbex Maps interactive atlas, verified YouTube embeds, and real historical context.
Free urbex GPS: how Urbex Maps works
Every spot in this guide has a free GPS pin on the Urbex Maps interactive atlas. No account required, just coordinates with satellite imagery and access notes. The full Montana database has 78 documented locations, covering gold rush ghost towns, silver mining camps, copper-era industrial ruins, and abandoned homesteads across the mountain West.
1. Garnet Ghost Town
Garnet is widely considered the best-preserved ghost town in Montana, and it has a strong claim to being one of the best in the entire American West. Located at 6,000 feet in the Garnet Range about 30 miles east of Missoula, the town boomed in the 1890s when gold was discovered in the surrounding mountains. At its peak, Garnet had roughly 1,000 residents, a hotel, four saloons, a school, a doctor's office, and the full commercial infrastructure of a functioning mountain town.
The gold didn't last. By 1900, the easily accessible ore had been extracted, and the large mining companies that had invested in Garnet began pulling out. A devastating fire in 1912 destroyed the main business district, and most residents left rather than rebuild. A brief revival during the 1930s, when gold prices rose during the Depression, brought a few hundred people back to work smaller claims. But by the time World War II pulled men away from the mines for military service, Garnet was effectively finished. The last permanent residents left in the 1940s.
What makes Garnet exceptional is what they left behind. More than 30 original buildings still stand, including the J.K. Wells Hotel, the Davey Store, the Kelly's Saloon, miners' cabins, and a variety of outbuildings. The Bureau of Land Management manages the site and has stabilized many of the structures without modernizing them. You can walk through the hotel, peer into the cabins, and see the daily life artifacts that miners abandoned when they left. In winter, Garnet is accessible only by snowmobile or cross-country skis, and the BLM maintains two rustic rental cabins for visitors who want to spend the night in a genuine ghost town. The combination of quantity, quality, and mountain setting makes Garnet the definitive Montana ghost town experience.
2. Bannack Ghost Town
Bannack is where Montana began. Gold was discovered on Grasshopper Creek on July 28, 1862, by a party led by John White, and within months a tent city of prospectors had grown into a boomtown of 10,000 people, making it the largest settlement in the region. Bannack became the first territorial capital of Montana in 1864, a distinction it held until the capital was moved to Virginia City the following year.
The town's early history reads like a Western novel. Henry Plummer, the town sheriff, was also secretly the leader of a gang of road agents who robbed and murdered travelers along the trails between Bannack and Virginia City. When the citizens of Bannack and Virginia City formed a vigilance committee in late 1863 and early 1864, they hanged Plummer and more than 20 of his associates. The vigilante hangings are among the most famous episodes of frontier justice in American history and gave Montana its state motto: "Oro y Plata" (Gold and Silver).
As the placer gold deposits played out, Bannack's population dropped steadily. Dredge mining kept some activity going into the early 20th century, and the last permanent residents didn't leave until the 1970s. Today, Bannack State Park preserves more than 60 structures along the original main street, including the Hotel Meade (a former courthouse converted to a hotel), the Masonic Lodge, the schoolhouse, the Methodist church, and rows of log cabins and frame houses. The buildings are maintained in a state of "arrested decay," meaning the park service stabilizes them to prevent collapse but doesn't restore or modernize them. The result is an authentic ghost town that looks much as it did when the last residents locked their doors. Bannack Days, held annually in July, draws thousands of visitors for living history demonstrations.
3. Granite Ghost Town
Granite is the ghost town that died in a single day. Located on the side of a mountain above Philipsburg in Granite County, the town was home to the Granite Mountain Mine, which at its peak was the richest silver mine in Montana and one of the richest in the world. The mine produced an estimated $40 million in silver ore during its operational life (well over a billion dollars in today's terms), and the town that grew up around it reached a population of roughly 3,000 by the early 1890s.
The town had everything a prosperous mining community needed: a hospital, churches, a school, the massive Miners Union Hall (reportedly the first union hall in Montana), saloons, boarding houses, and the infrastructure to support round-the-clock mining operations at high elevation. Granite was connected to Philipsburg in the valley below by a narrow-gauge railroad that hauled ore down and supplies up.
Then came the Panic of 1893. When the U.S. government repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act on June 26, 1893, the price of silver collapsed almost overnight. The Granite Mountain Mine, which depended on federally supported silver prices, became uneconomical in a matter of days. The mine closed. Workers were laid off. And the town of Granite emptied with a speed that shocked even the people who lived there. Within weeks, the population of 3,000 had dropped to a few hundred, and within a few years, almost everyone was gone.
The ruins today include the shell of the Miners Union Hall (the most prominent remaining structure), mine headframes, scattered cabins, and the foundations of commercial buildings. The site is on a steep mountainside accessible by a rough dirt road from Philipsburg. The views are spectacular, and the scale of the ruins gives a sense of how substantial this community was before silver's crash emptied it.
4. Elkhorn Ghost Town
Elkhorn is one of Montana's most photogenic ghost towns, known primarily for two iconic wooden buildings, Fraternity Hall and Gillian Hall, that stand side by side in a mountain meadow surrounded by pine forest in Jefferson County. The town was established in the 1870s when silver was discovered in the Elkhorn Mountains, and it grew to a peak population of approximately 2,500 by the late 1880s.
The Elkhorn Mine was a major producer, shipping ore to the smelter in nearby Boulder. The town had all the standard boomtown amenities: hotels, saloons, a general store, a livery stable, and the two fraternal lodge halls that would become its most enduring legacy. Fraternity Hall, built in the 1880s, served as the meeting place for local fraternal organizations and doubled as the town's social center for dances, meetings, and community events. Gillian Hall served a similar purpose next door.
Elkhorn's decline came from two directions simultaneously. The same silver price collapse of 1893 that killed Granite hit Elkhorn hard, shutting down mining operations and driving out workers. Then a diphtheria epidemic swept through the town, killing a disproportionate number of children and devastating the families who had planned to wait out the economic downturn. The combination of economic collapse and disease emptied Elkhorn within a few years. Small-scale mining continued intermittently into the 20th century, but the town was completely abandoned by the 1970s.
Today, Fraternity Hall and Gillian Hall are managed as a state park unit, and the two buildings have been stabilized to prevent further deterioration. Several other structures remain on the townsite, including cabins and mine buildings in various states of decay. The setting is remarkable: the two tall wooden halls standing alone in a clearing with the Elkhorn Mountains rising behind them, looking exactly like the kind of scene you'd expect from a Hollywood Western but entirely real.
5. Comet Ghost Town
Comet is a ghost town in Jefferson County that produced over $20 million in minerals across a 70-year operational life, cycling through booms and busts until the ore finally gave out in 1941. Unlike many Montana ghost towns that were single-commodity operations dependent on gold or silver alone, Comet's mines produced a diversified portfolio of lead, zinc, copper, silver, and gold, which allowed the town to survive economic downturns that killed more specialized mining camps.
The mining operation at Comet began in the 1870s, and the town grew through the 1880s and 1890s to include a company store, boarding houses, a school, residences for miners and their families, and the industrial infrastructure needed to extract and process multiple types of ore. The Basin and Bay State Mining Company operated the primary mines and the mill that processed the ore. When silver prices collapsed in 1893, Comet survived because its lead and zinc production kept the operation viable, a luxury that single-metal towns like Granite and Elkhorn didn't have.
The town operated in fits and starts through the early 20th century, closing and reopening as metal prices fluctuated with war, depression, and peacetime demand cycles. World War I created strong demand for lead and zinc, bringing a temporary boom. The Depression years were lean but survivable. When the mine finally exhausted its economically viable ore in 1941, the town shut down for good.
Today, roughly two dozen buildings remain at Comet, scattered across a mountain valley accessible by a dirt road from Basin. The structures include residential cabins, mine buildings, the remains of the ore processing facility, and various support buildings. The site is on private land but is generally accessible to visitors who stay on the roads and respect the property. The buildings are deteriorating but many are still structurally sound enough to photograph. Comet is less visited and less well known than Garnet or Bannack, which gives it a rougher, more authentic feeling for explorers who prefer their ghost towns without interpretive signage.
6. Coolidge Ghost Town
Coolidge is one of Montana's most remote and atmospheric ghost towns, sitting at approximately 7,000 feet in the Pioneer Mountains of Beaverhead County. The town was built in 1914 to support the Elkhorn silver mine (not to be confused with the Elkhorn ghost town in Jefferson County), and at its peak, Coolidge had around 400 residents, a company store, boarding houses, a schoolhouse, and the industrial buildings needed to run a high-altitude mining operation.
The town's name came from Calvin Coolidge, and its short life was shaped by a combination of poor silver prices, brutal winters at elevation, and a catastrophic infrastructure failure. The mining company built a dam and a narrow-gauge railroad to serve the operation, and both were essential to keeping the remote site functional. When silver prices dropped in the late 1920s, the mine became marginal. Then in the early 1930s, the dam failed, washing out sections of the railroad and the road that connected Coolidge to the outside world. Without reliable transportation to move ore out and supplies in, the operation was finished. The mine closed in 1932, and the town was abandoned.
The remoteness that made Coolidge expensive to supply during its operational years has also made it one of the best-preserved ghost towns in the state. The site is accessible only via a rough forest road from Wise River, and the drive alone filters out most casual visitors. At the townsite, you'll find collapsed and partially standing wooden structures scattered through a mountain meadow, including the remains of the company store, miners' cabins, and mine buildings. The high elevation, harsh winters, and heavy snowfall have taken their toll on the wooden structures, and many have collapsed under the weight of decades of accumulated snow. But the setting is extraordinary: a ghost town in a mountain valley surrounded by peaks, with the silence and remoteness that make you feel genuinely far from the modern world.
Beyond the List
Montana's 78 documented abandoned places on the Urbex Maps atlas include dozens more ghost towns scattered across the state's mountain ranges and river valleys. Virginia City and Nevada City, though partially preserved as tourist attractions, still contain genuine abandoned structures. Marysville, Castle Town, and Maiden are less visited but equally rich in mining-era remains. The copper mining city of Butte, while still inhabited, contains neighborhoods and industrial sites that qualify as urban ruins on a massive scale. And the eastern Montana prairies have their own category of abandonment: homestead-era farmsteads and railroad towns that were settled during the early 20th century land rush and emptied when drought, the Depression, and mechanized agriculture made small-scale farming impossible. The GPS coordinates are free. The map is live. Go find what Montana left behind.
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