Nevada is the rare state where a lot of the abandoned places are legal to walk around, because the Bureau of Land Management owns them. The catch is the roads and the heat, not the law.
Where to go
Rhyolite, off State Route 374 west of Beatty, is BLM land and open free every day sunrise to sunset. The Cook Bank walls, the 1906 Tom Kelly Bottle House and the railway depot are the survivors of a town that peaked at 3,500 to 5,000 people around 1907. The Goldwell Open Air Museum sculpture park next door is a working museum, open around the clock with a visitor center Monday to Saturday, 10 to 4.
Delamar in Lincoln County, the camp they called the Widowmaker after its silicosis epidemic, is also open BLM ground with no fence and no patrol. Getting there means about 30 minutes of dirt road off US-93 and a 4×4. Some adjoining mining claims are private and posted, and the two cemeteries have been vandalised.
Nelson in Eldorado Canyon is not abandoned. It is a working paid attraction: Eldorado Canyon Mine Tours runs guided walks of the Techatticup millsite and Savage Mine at 9am, noon and 2pm by reservation, $20 for adults and $12.50 for children 5 to 12. Some of the houses in Nelson are lived in. The crashed fighter jet everyone photographs is a prop built for a 2001 film.
The Goldfield Hotel has been empty since 1945 and is boarded, privately owned and closed. The owners ask people to look at it from the street, and break-ins by explorers and ghost hunters keep being reported. Stokes Castle above Austin is similar: the granite tower is fenced off and unsafe inside, but the viewing area around it is free and open sunrise to sunset.
One correction worth making: the American Flats ruins near Silver City, properly the United Comstock Merger Mill, are gone. The BLM demolished all eight standing structures in autumn 2014 after an audit rated the site a high-risk liability. The ground is still public land, but there is no mill to explore.
Before you drive out
Rhyolite and Delamar are legal to visit and free; artefact collecting is not, on either. Nelson costs money and runs on a schedule. The Goldfield Hotel and the interior of Stokes Castle are closed and entering them is trespass on private property. Delamar has open shafts and adits with rotten timber, and so does the Bullfrog district around Rhyolite. There is no cell service at either ghost town, and the Delamar road washes out.
Full state list with check dates: abandoned places in Nevada.