Ghost Town

It started when I chose the scenic route out of Moab, gateway to Utah’s red-rock country.

Taking a rain check on the crowds bound for Arches National Park, I followed Highway 128,  a ribbon of road twisting beside the Colorado River, its restless waters rehearsing the role they’d one day perfect – carving the Grand Canyon. Somewhere along that lonely stretch, I could have turned left toward the comfort of the Interstate. Instead, I veered right and stumbled into Cisco—a ghost town where the silence hums with the sense that you are never entirely alone.

The first thing you notice are the signs. Keep Out. No Trespassing. And the one that makes you pause: Never Mind the Dog – Beware the Owner, painted beside the barrel of a revolver aimed straight between your eyes. Rusting cars, collapsing cabins, and wind-worn sheds litter the landscape, while a sun-bleached graveyard keeps its own counsel. Cisco isn’t just abandoned—it feels watchful.

Yet this eerie place wasn’t always desolation. In the 1880s, Cisco thrived as a water stop on the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. Cattlemen and sheep ranchers depended on it; at the turn of the century, over 100,000 sheep were sheared here. Oil and gas discoveries kept the town alive through the 1920s, and when America fell in love with the automobile, Cisco’s gas stations and diners caught the overflow of road-trippers chasing the open highway. Even Hollywood and music paid their respects—Thelma and Louise, Vanishing Point, Don’t Come Knocking all filmed here, and Johnny Cash once sang of Cisco after filling his tank with $7 worth of gas.

But progress has little patience. Diesel trains no longer needed water stops in the middle of nowhere. The Interstate rerouted travelers in the blink of a Chevy’s headlights. By the 1980s, Cisco was fading; by the 1990s, the last residents slipped away. What remains is a skeleton of what once was—wood splintering under desert sun, iron rusting into dust, echoes where laughter and labor once lived.

Cisco isn’t a destination so much as a detour, a shadow cast across the desert. Visit Arches, lose yourself in Moab, marvel at Canyonlands—but if you take the turnoff to Cisco, don’t expect a crowd. You may well be the only living soul wandering its broken streets.

Then again… maybe not.

Quick Links

Arches National Park  

Canyonlands National Park