Iosepa

Tucked into Skull Valley about 75 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Iosepa is a ghost town with a distinctly human story at its center. Between 1889 and 1917, more than 200 Polynesian members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built a farming community here in Tooele County, Utah — an agricultural settlement far from their island homelands. The community thrived for nearly three decades before being abandoned in 1917.

Today the site carries on a living tradition: every Memorial Day, islanders and others from across the Western United States gather here to commemorate the community and those buried on the land. Outside that annual event, visitors encounter a quiet, open valley landscape where the traces of a once-active agricultural settlement remain.

Access is straightforward for most of the year, though winter months in this high desert valley can bring hazardous conditions. The site suits travelers interested in history, photography, and the understated power of a place that still draws people back generation after generation.