High Desert Empire
Exploring the ghost town of Shaniko in Central Oregon
by Josiah Roe, Felipe Silva, and Ethan Balnap
The sunset drive along State Highway 97 cuts through the Central Oregon high desert, a long stretch of asphalt surrounded by sagebrush sea and horizons broken by volcanoes and the rocky remnants of eruptions eons past. On a rise above the road sits Shaniko, a town that feels caught between history and forgetting.
When I step out of the van the silence is immediate. No cars, no voices, only the restless wind pressing through weathered wood and rattling a loose sheet of tin. Shaniko once called itself the “Wool Capital of the World.”
Today, it is a ghost town.
At the turn of the 20th century, this place was alive. Sheep ranchers from across Oregon drove their herds down out of the Cascades and east from the desert to here: wool bales piled high in the massive brick warehouse waiting for the Columbia Southern Railroad to haul them north to the river.
The Shaniko Hotel, still standing in proud decay, welcomed traders and travelers. Banks, saloons, and a schoolhouse gave the town its rhythm. For a fleeting moment, it must have felt permanent, a small empire rising from the high desert.
But permanence in the West is always provisional. By 1911, new rail lines bypassed Shaniko, leaving it stranded. Without trains, the wool business collapsed. Families moved on, storefronts emptied, and the desert wind reclaimed the streets. By mid-century, Shaniko was a ghost town in every sense, a monument to boom and bust.
I wander through what remains: the weathered jailhouse, the skeletal remains of barns, a quiet gas station, a loudly colored abandoned school, and the wide main street lined with shuttered doors. Rusted car after rusted truck; all are dimly lit.
The Shaniko Hotel looms above it all, its second-story windows staring out like tired eyes. I press my hand to the brick and imagine the wool bales stacked inside a hundred years ago, the voices of ranchers haggling over prices, the whistle of a locomotive pulling into town.
Ghost towns are rarely just ruins. They are memory anchored in place. Shaniko feels less abandoned than suspended, as if the town is holding its breath, waiting for someone to notice.In summer, a handful of shops open their doors, selling antiques and ice cream to curious travelers.
A small community, 36 people as of the 2010 census, keeps the lights on, determined to preserve what is left. But most of the year, Shaniko belongs to the wind, the sagebrush, and the long shadows of the past.
As the sun dips toward the horizon, Main Street glows in warm desert light. The paint peels, the windows cloud, but the bones of the town endure. Standing here, it is impossible not to think about the impermanence of ambition, how quickly fortune can vanish, and how the land always outlasts what we build upon it.
Shaniko is not entirely gone. It lingers like an afterimage, part ghost, part living museum. And in the quiet, you can almost hear the echoes: wool wagons creaking, footsteps on the boardwalk, laughter spilling from a saloon on a summer night more than a century ago.
