In a West filled with ghost towns, both commercialized and remote, Oatman might just be the most unghostly of them all. 

The dusty parking lot fills up quickly on busy weekends. Cars can drive straight through the center of town, and Teslas regularly parallel park right in front of the Old West-style wooden storefronts. Sure, cell service is spotty, but that doesn’t stop throngs of tourists from taking selfies. 

Amid all of this juxtaposition between modern life and a town frozen in time, one thing has remained a constant: Oatman is filled with donkeys. The Arizona mining town’s frequent claim to fame is that it’s home to more donkeys than people. 

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Oatman transformed into a gold rush boomtown in the early 1900s, growing from a dusty tent camp tucked into Arizona’s Black Mountains to a full-service town with hotels, saloons and numerous mines by its peak in the 1920s. But in the 1940s, the mines were closed during World War II, and the town was quickly abandoned. As miners left the rocky mountains surrounding Oatman, they set their burros free into the wilderness. 

Oatman, Ariz., on........

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