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Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

Are there really sites undisturbed enough for you to see how they did repairs or disposed of their trash? That sounds amazing.

SW-America is definitely on my bucket list and I love ghost towns. In Western Europe it's hard to find any abandoned place older than a couple of years that's preserved well. I guess it's because the next city is never very far and there's always uncultured idiots whose idea of fun it is to vandalize places for no reason.

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You’re in for a treat, it’s within a timescale of 200 years or so, but definitely. The climate, terrain, distances, ownership, and uselessness of most of the land involved really encourage preservation, albeit rotted out and rusting.

Rotted out and rusting is beautiful, I love it. Next best thing to getting a time machine and going back :)

It's incredible what's been left behind and still in decent shape. As you've found, any place with a lot of human traffic tends to get destroyed by vandals but fortunately the SW deserts are massive and hold a shocking amount of old mining roads that lead to well preserved locations. A spot that requires a modest amount of effort to reach tends to filter out the idiots.

Another favorite site I didn't mention are the old mining structures. Image search for something like "old mining headframe" to see the sort of thing I'm talking about. There are a lot of those structures still standing from many decades ago.

To put a different perspective on that: The remaining Native American ruins in the Southwest are roughly the same age as European castles.

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