Live Wyoming’s Past During South Pass City Gold Rush Days

Feeling lucky? Try your hand at Faro!
Gold Rush Days July 6th and 7th in South Pass City.
$5 a person, kids 2 years old and younger are free!

South Pass City Gold Rush Days. Pan for gold, see historic exhibits and gold mining demonstrations, Pony Express reenactments, a vintage baseball tournament, live saloon music and the anvil blasting at the Price Street Bridge every hour on the hour.

Tours of the Carissa Mine & Mill 1-3 pm. Grand Opening of the 5-mile Interpretive Trails.

Bake Sale and food. A fireworks display on Sat. at 10 pm

Check the website for schedule.

If you love Wyoming and you love ghost towns, you have to make South Pass City a planned stop.

South Pass City was once a bustling boom town until the gold was all but mined out.

Today it stands as the past, preserved.

Go there to see what the old west was really like.

South Pass City, it's just to the west of Jeffrey City and south of the Wind River Reservation.

The official South Pass City website gives you directions. Those directions will lead you down a long gravel road into the middle of NOTHING. But there it is.

Explore it yourself or take guided tours of the city.

The English Tunnel tour will astound you.

There are many firsts there, including the first Mason Lodge built in Wyoming.

As Wikipedia documents, South Pass City had its first brush with greatness in 1861 when Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) passed through the area and ended up including his experience there in his writing of "Roughing It".

South Pass really began to be a bustle of activity when gold was discovered near there in 1866.

The population boomed and within a few years, the town boasted the first female justice of the peace ever in Esther Hobart Morris.

By the time the town reached the mid-1870's, the gold supplies had shrunk as did the population. That trend continued from that era to the ghost town that it is today.

We are fortunate to have so much rich history in Wyoming and South Pass City is a great part of it.

You really can't miss if you're looking for a relatively short family trip.