Cisco: Ghost Town on the High Desert

Cisco was born in the eighteen eighties as a watering stop for steam locomotives on the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. Engines needed water; so towns sprung up where the tanks were.

For a time Cisco punched above its weight. Ranchers sheared and shipped sheep from here. Then oil and natural gas were discovered nearby in nineteen twenty-four.

But the end of the steam era killed the water-stop economy, and when Interstate Seventy was built miles to the south, bypassing town entirely, the last reasons to stop evaporated. The two thousand twenty census counted four residents. The crumbling storefronts and rusting equipment baking in the canyon sun are all that remain of a town that existed entirely because steam engines got thirsty.