The Arizona ghost town that's overrun with donkeys

"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."

"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."

"Nearly a century later, the descendants of those burros are thriving. While the burros of the gold rush carried heavy supplies through the desert and hauled gold out of the mines, today's burros waltz through Oatman's main street, eating hay cubes straight out of the hands of tourists. In recent years, more than 1,000 wild burros have roamed the approximately 1 million-acre Black Mountain Herd Management Area."

Oatman, Arizona grew into a gold rush boomtown in the early 1900s, expanding from a tent camp in the Black Mountains to a full-service town with hotels, saloons and numerous mines by the 1920s. The mines closed during World War II, and miners released their burros into the wilderness. Descendants of those burros now roam town and the surrounding Black Mountain Herd Management Area, with more than 1,000 wild burros across roughly 1 million acres managed as mixed public and private lands. Oatman later became a Route 66 stop and today is a busy tourist destination where burros interact with visitors.

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