Ghost towns Tooele County
The one mining camp in the county you can actually walk
Ophir, the ghost town people still live in.
Ophir is a small mining town tucked in a canyon on the west side of the Oquirrh Mountains, about forty minutes south of Tooele. Silver and lead built it in the 1870s, it voted itself out of existence in 2016, and a few dozen people still live on its one street. The thing most visitors get wrong is treating it like an empty ruin. It is a lived-in place kept as an open-air historic district by volunteers, and the whole visit turns on being a good guest.
The short answer
Drive up Ophir Canyon, park near the old train car at the bottom of the street, and walk the one main road past the restored houses and shops toward the schoolhouse at the top. It is free, it takes most people under an hour, and there are restrooms and picnic tables on site. Ophir is not a fenced attraction and it is not an abandoned ruin. It is a real town of a few dozen residents that keeps its historic core open to visitors on trust, so the rule that matters more than any other is simple: stay off private property, and treat the whole street as someone's front yard, because most of it is.
Before you go
The manners come first here.
Almost everything that makes Ophir worth the drive also makes it fragile. It survives because residents and the families of old miners chose to keep the buildings up and the gate open, and because visitors have mostly behaved. Read this part before the history, because it is the part that keeps the place the way you came to see it.
People live in Ophir, so read the street as private until a sign says otherwise. The historic buildings are set along a road lined with occupied homes, and there is no fence between the two. Park where you are directed near the bottom of the street, keep to the public road and the marked historic structures, do not walk into yards or open doors that are not clearly part of the district, and do not fly a drone low over the houses. The site is run entirely by volunteers on donations, so pack out what you bring and leave the buildings exactly as you found them. Get this right and Ophir stays open for the next person.
The practical basics
- Admission is free; donations go to the volunteers who maintain the district
- Restrooms and picnic tables are on site near the bottom of the street
- The buildings are typically closed Sunday, though you can still walk the street and look in windows
The road and the season
- Ophir Canyon Road climbs a few miles off SR-73; it is paved to town but narrow
- Spring through fall is the easy window; the canyon holds snow and shade ice in winter
- There are no services in town, so fuel and food happen back in Tooele
Do not expect
- A staffed ticket booth or set tour times; the train car serves as a small visitor stop
- A ticketed festival to plan a trip around; the draw is the everyday open-air district
- Reliable cell signal up the canyon, so download directions before you leave town
What still stands
One street, bottom to top.
Ophir is easy to read because it is essentially one road up a canyon. Start at the bottom and walk up, and the town lays out its own history in order.
Park near the old railroad car at the foot of the street, which the volunteers use as a makeshift visitor stop, with the pavilion, picnic tables and restrooms close by. From there the main road runs uphill past a row of restored nineteenth century buildings that residents and descendants of mining families gathered, repaired and furnished with family antiques to hold the town's story in place. It reads less like a roadside marker and more like a village you can walk into.
The building to find is the Ophir Town Hall, a false-fronted frame structure at 57 East Main built around 1870. It is one of only three mining-town halls in Utah known to survive from the 1800s, older than the city halls that still stand in Park City and Eureka, and over its life it did duty as a jail, a meeting hall, a city hall and a fire station. A small museum along the street fills in the rest with photographs and mining-era artifacts, and a church, a hotel and a run of original homes and shops sit between it and the top.
Keep walking and the street ends near the old schoolhouse on the upper end of town, which has been put back to use as a learning space. When the town disincorporated in 2016, the Tooele County School District took over the public property, including the historic district, which is part of why the schoolhouse and the collection have stayed cared for. The buildings are generally closed on Sunday, but the walk itself is open any dry day, and looking in through the windows is half the point.
Walking the district
- The full walk up the street and back is roughly fifteen minutes at a stroll, more if you read every plaque.
- Morning light works best for photographs of the false fronts, before the canyon walls throw the street into shadow.
- The town hall, the school and the museum are the anchors; the homes between them are the lived-in part, so photograph the buildings, not the residents.
- Wear real shoes; the street and the shoulders are gravel and dirt, not a paved promenade.
The silver story
Silver, lead, and a town that let go.
Prospectors found silver and lead in this canyon in the late 1860s, and the strike on Lion Hill turned a mining camp into a town almost overnight. Ophir took its name from the biblical land King Solomon drew gold from, which tells you how much the men who named it hoped to find. Through the 1870s it was a real boomtown of saloons, shops and thousands of people working the veins in the hills above.
The ore ran down over the decades, as it always does, and the town shrank with it. What is unusual is the ending. Ophir stayed an incorporated municipality, one of Utah's smallest, right up until 2016, when there were no longer enough residents willing and able to fill the town offices, and it formally disincorporated. Rather than let the historic core fall down, residents and the county worked to keep it standing as the district you walk today. It is a rare thing to see: a town that ran out of people to govern it but not people to care for it.
The rest of the county's mining camps
Ophir is the one camp in the Oquirrhs you can walk through freely. The others tell a different, harder story about access: Mercur one canyon south is fenced and gated behind a mining company, Jacob City is an off-highway climb, and Gold Hill and Clifton stand far out in the west desert. The survey of all of them, and of Stockton as the living gateway, is on the Tooele County ghost towns and mining camps page. This one stays in Ophir.
Living near Ophir
The canyon is the visit; the valley is the home.
Nobody moves to Ophir itself, but the day-trip radius that includes it is real estate people do choose. The towns spread across Tooele Valley, twenty to forty minutes down the canyon and out onto the flat, are where you would actually live and still have this drive on a free afternoon.
County seat
Tooele
The nearest full town to Ophir, and the base for fuel, groceries and a hospital before or after the canyon.
Open the city guideAcross the valley
Grantsville
The older farm town on the west side of Tooele Valley, with its own pioneer history and acreage lots.
Open the city guideHorse country
Erda
The valley's newest city, larger lots and open ground between Tooele and the interstate.
Open the city guideThe county's front door
Lake Point
Where SR-36 meets I-80, the shortest commute in the county toward Salt Lake and the airport.
Open the city guideKeep exploring
Ghost Towns and Mining Camps
Mercur, Jacob City, Gold Hill and Clifton, and which of them you can legally visit right now.
Read the guideThe whole county
Tooele County on The Local
The salt flats, the Pony Express Trail, Skull Valley, Stansbury Park and the rest of the region.
Open the hubQuick answers
Ophir, answered.
Yes. Ophir keeps its historic core open to the public as an open-air district you can walk for free. Park near the old train car at the bottom of the street and follow the main road uphill past the restored buildings toward the schoolhouse. It is not a gated attraction, but it is a lived-in town, so keep to the public road and the marked historic structures and stay off private property.
Yes. A few dozen people live in Ophir year round, which is exactly why it does not feel like a typical ghost town. The historic buildings sit along a road of occupied homes with no fence between them, so treat the street as private unless a sign marks a building as part of the district, and photograph the buildings rather than the residents.
From Tooele, take SR-36 south about twelve miles to the junction with SR-73, turn east and follow SR-73 roughly five miles to the marked Ophir Canyon Road, then turn and climb the canyon a few miles into town. It is about forty minutes of driving. The last stretch is a narrow canyon road with no services and spotty cell signal, so download directions before you leave Tooele.
No. There is no admission charge to walk the district. The site is run entirely by volunteers, and they accept donations that go toward keeping the buildings standing, so leaving a few dollars is a fair trade for a free morning. Everything else, from the museum to the picnic tables and restrooms, is open at no cost.
The main street holds a row of restored nineteenth century buildings: the false-fronted Ophir Town Hall built around 1870, a schoolhouse at the upper end now used as a learning space, a church, a hotel, original homes and shops, and a small museum of photographs and mining-era artifacts. An old railroad car at the bottom of the street serves as a makeshift visitor stop. It is a compact walk, but a dense one.
The street is walkable any dry day, and spring through fall is the easy window. The buildings are generally closed on Sunday, though you can still walk the district and look in the windows. The canyon road holds snow and shade ice in winter, so a clear-weather weekday morning is the calm, well-lit way to see it before the light drops behind the canyon walls.
There is no regular ticketed festival to plan a trip around, so do not build your visit on an event. The reason to come is the everyday open-air district itself, which is open through the dry season. If you want a scheduled county celebration to pair with the drive, look at what Tooele County runs down in the valley, and confirm the current dates before you go.
Yes. There are restrooms and picnic tables on site near the bottom of the street, by the pavilion and the old train car. Beyond that there are no services in town, no gas and no store, so plan to fuel up and buy food back in Tooele before you drive up the canyon.
No. Mercur, the gold camp one canyon south of Ophir, is fenced and gated on private mining-company land and is closed to the public, so do not plan to enter it. Ophir is the one camp in this part of the Oquirrhs you can walk freely. The full picture of Mercur, Jacob City, Gold Hill and Clifton, and which are legal to visit, is on the Tooele County ghost towns page.
A canyon like this is a reason to know the valley below it.
Ophir is a morning. Tooele Valley is the decision, and it turns on things a visit cannot show you: which side of the valley the wind favors, how the two routes to the interstate really drive at rush hour, and what a given street costs. Tell me what you are weighing and I will introduce you to a Tooele County partner agent who knows the ground, and stay on the file for the research and the financing side.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home buyers and sellers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.