Raised From The Dead

One historian knows how to give ghost towns a new life.

- Jana Bommersbach

Looting, wildfires, pollution, vandalism, time, the elements—Western ghost towns have lots of enemies. Thankfully, they’ve also got friends like Krista Evans.

“I love abandoned landscapes. They’re very beautiful and a little surreal,” Evans says. “I like imagining how they might have been in their heyday, when they were a happening place, but I also love the quiet of them now.”

Evans loves frontier ghost towns so much, she devoted her master’s thesis to their preservation, focusing on four sites that were founded during the late 1800s and abandoned by the mid-1900s as hard rock mining towns in Montana and Idaho.

When she was growing up in northern Michigan, Evans found “lots” of old mining sites to explore. So when she looked west, she saw the importance of these remaining ghost towns to both history and tourism.