Check out the mental floss essay here.

There are a thousand ghost towns spread across the western United States — a whole constellation of loss and ruin — but most are little more than foundations, or at best a few tumbledown shacks, or if the people who lived and died there did anything of note, and if they’re lucky, a sun-faded commemorative plaque mounted on a squat stone pillar. The ghost town of Bodie, however, is another story altogether. A mining boomtown, it was the third most populous city in the state of California in 1880. By the 1940s sickness, wars, bad weather and exhausted mines had led to the town’s desertion, and its isolated, inhospitable location made certain that it stayed that way; no one eyed this high desert waste, 8,000 feet above sea level between Yosemite and the lonely Nevada border, and imagined a shopping mall in its place. Count us all lucky. You can read the whole essay here, and order prints of these photos here.

Once the largest town in Nevada, Goldfield is a boomtown gone bust. Perhaps none of its many empty buildings are more a testament to what Goldfield has lost than its high school, which has stood abandoned to vandals and the elements since the 1950s. The mental floss article is here. Order prints here.

Read the mentalfloss article, or order prints here.

When Los Angeles stole the water from Owens Lake, Keeler began to dry up, too. Check out my mental floss blog on Keeler. Prints are available here.

Inaccessible to the general public, I was lucky enough to get a tour behind the barbed wire of an airplane graveyard in the Mojave desert, which has been on virtual lockdown since 9/11. Here's my mental floss article on the airplane graveyard, and if you'd like prints of any of these pictures, they're available here.

This is what happens when we make inland seas where inland seas aren't supposed to go. Read the essay here. Prints are here.

My mental floss essay on Linda Vista is here. You can get prints of these photos here.

Read the article -- Vanuatu: Happiest Place on Earth? Prints are available here.

Some of these photos are available as prints here.