Bloody Basin Road, Beaver Flats Road, Mammoth Mine Road — Arizona has road names unlike most states. There’s much about this 48th state, a territory which joined the United States a little under a hundred years ago in 1912, that retains its Old West origins, including a reconstructed 1890s gold-mining town, the Goldfield Ghost Town near the legendary Superstition Mountains. If you want to live in the present but visit the past, then you should stay in one of the best hotels in Phoenix , then travel east, just about four miles outside Apache Junction, and find your way to 4650 North Mammoth Mine Road.

You and your family might spend the whole day here, taking a ride on the Superstition Narrow Gauge Railroad on a 36″ gauge train consisting of a Plymouth diesel engine that pulls a passenger car and caboose. The twenty minute trip circles the town for a mile and a half as the engineer tells passengers about the history of the town, the Superstition Mountains, and the desert in general.

There’s also the Goldfield Mine Tours, which takes about twenty-five minutes, consisting of a guided tour underground. The guide will tell you about the history the mine, gold mining equipment and procedures. Literally, there’s everything in this small town — from a Church on the Mount that holds real religious services on Sunday morning to Lu Lu’s Bordello, a fake bordello, which gives you a guided tour of the history of women in the 1800s. A gold historian can teach you how to pan for gold at Prospector’s Palace, and, once an hour on the streets, gunfighters will come out and shoot each other. If you want, it’s possible to arrange for friends to be “arrested” and thrown into jail, too.

Of particular interest in Goldfield, though, is Goldfield’s Historic Museum, which contains an exhibit on the Lost Dutchman gold mine , one of the most famous mines in the country, most likely because no one knows, to this day, where it’s located. There’s a power in myth and names that you can explore in the city of Phoenix (named after a mythic firebird) and out at the Goldfield Ghost Town on Mammoth Mine Road.

Goldfield Ghost Town Near Phoenix is a post from: Your Moment is Now

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