4+ Years Living In An Abandoned Ghost Town

Hello there! My name is Brent and behind me is the abandoned mining town of Cerro Gordo. And back in the 1800s this was a mining boom town. There were thousands of residents, hundreds of buildings, and they pulled 500 million dollars worth of ore out of these hills you see behind me. I've been living up here for the past four years trying to bring the town back to life. I spend my days exploring the abandoned mines, fixing up the old buildings, going on hikes, and just trying to understand everything that I can about this town. And over the past few months, a lot has happened. I diagnosed the water source 700 feet down in an abandoned mining shaft, learned a bunch of new history, planted some trees, and a whole bunch more. So in this video, we're getting into everything going on up here over the last few months. A skeleton, maybe a sheep? Spooky. So it has been over four years that I have been roaming these hills around Cerro Gordo, which is hard to believe. You know, that's as long as high school or college. And I feel like somehow even more has happened up here than both of those. There's some similarities. I moved somewhere new. I really put myself out of my comfort zone. I made friends that I'm going to call friends for life. I learned a bunch of new things. I feel like on the other side, I'm a totally different person than the guy that came up here four years ago in slippers got stuck in a snowstorm. And these days, the logistical challenges are not how do I feed myself up here, but how do I build a commercial building? How do we get a massive water tank up the road? How do I keep this town alive for future generations? I would say some of my best memories are right here inside of the hoist house. This is the home to the main mine shaft here at Cerro Gordo. Behind me is the 900 foot drop that is the union mine. And off of that, there's about 30 miles of mines. This is the first place that I had heard whispers of water at Cerro Gordo. I had heard that maybe possibly there was water 700 feet down this mine shaft behind me and maybe possibly it just needed to replace a pump. And maybe possibly there's a pool of water beyond that, but it all just seemed like fairytale really. But after enough time up here, I met some guys in the local community. They're like, no, let's give it a go. So we got this cage working, made our way down there. I saw the water with my own eyes for the first time. We ended up running 700 feet of pipe up back here and we got water flowing back up here for the first time thanks to the original water crew. And it was very exciting. It just felt like everything was possible again up here at Cerro Gordo. And it stopped and it was an ongoing battle for about two years. The water would go on, go off, go on, go off. And eventually about a year ago, I just said, forget about it. We're not going to worry about the pump at the 700 foot level. We have this military truck now that Dave Sparks gave me and we're just trucking up water left and right. But now that I'm thinking about things like having a pond, all of these other items, I realized how nice it would be to get that couple hundred gallons of water out of the mine that we were getting every day. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back down there and I'm going to show exactly what the setup is down there right now. And we have a lot of very smart people that watch this channel that I know in the past have offered suggestions that I haven't been that receptive, but I am very receptive to any ideas of how we can get this pump producing on a regular level. And I'm willing to kind of do the work now. And so we're going to go down 700 feet. We're going to look at the pump, the water level, but beyond that, we're going to go all the way down to the 900 foot level. And at the 900 foot level, it's where I've been building out a luxury hotel suites of sort. And I've just loved spending time down there. And I would say that's a big reminder of how much things have changed in the past four years. If you had told me four years ago, that would have been even going down underground at all. I would have said, no way, but, uh, things changed. That was good. All right. We were headed 700 feet down, check on the water and do some other things. All right. After the trek, I am down here, 700 feet underground at Cerro Gordo's Union Mine. And I'm going to give you the most detailed look I've ever given about the water system because I want help. Before too many suggestions, I know, yes, if I put pumps at the other levels up, that would be better. Do not tell me to put a pump at every single level on the way up. One at most, ideally none, but for now let's go back and let's check out where the water actually comes from. All right. We were way back here and you can see, this is a very wet part of the Cerro Gordo mines. And this is where the water begins. You get to brought up and over here. It then comes over here to where you see a small ravine. Water goes down this pipe and water goes back over to the sump, which we're going to go to right now. And now that pipe takes a hard right turn and it comes here. You can see it's dripping pretty reliably. And so this is probably about 15 feet long by six to seven feet across by, let's try to get a depth so people can have a full measurement. Let me find something to measure with. There we go. That is how deep it is. So it's about three to four feet deep and it comes in there. It goes into the barrel thing. So the pipes don't float up. There is a float. You can see it here. If it's still connected, I don't know. But from here, it goes into this white pex that goes up and black. This could be an issue. It doesn't like going up. It's having to go up this grade a little bit. It comes over here and goes into this pump. This pump is a Neptune model number. 535SN3HP. And this is the pump that sends the water to the surface. So the water comes in there. There's all these checks. It goes up into here. It enters this galvanized pipe momentarily. So this comes over to here. Then it enters new pex about a hundred feet above this. So that is the current water setup here at Cerro Gordo. I would love any and all tips of how to get this thing working reliably, how to get more water out of it. I think if we lined that area where the water is dripping and maybe increased the sump, if we came down here and chiseled it out another five or six feet, maybe then it could hold more water. So maybe then we could pump more water if we're getting more water from the top. But I'm open to all solutions. I want two things. One, how to increase the amount of water that we can pull from the pump. I think that's really important. And then number two is how we can have it be more reliable. Let's hear it. Your best mapped out plan. You know, if you have a great one, I'd love to even bring you out here and you can help implement it with me. This is hat in hand, looking for help. So that's going to the water and I'm hoping to get it kind of fixed for not just the summer, but year round. This trip to the 900 is to try to control the dust a little bit. You know, when I went down there, there was just rotting woods for a long time and a lot of dirt. You know, you still have this grand ambition of having a whole house 900 getting around and got some extra supplies and fun stuff to get into that. Now we just wait. All right, I am back to my home away from home. Look at this. This looks great. My bed's been covered. No dust on that thing. My desk. This is where I recorded Ghost Town Living. Well, it's actually spooky now. A little dust on it. My book. It has took months, but I have brought power down here. I brought internet down here. I brought beds down here. I brought all of these things. And I think in the long term, this is going to be a whole house. All right. So this is the area that I kind of want to control the dust at first. So I'm going to lift up the bed, I'm going to level it some more, get some more of this material out here. I know there's better ways to do this, but right now all we're trying to accomplish is controlling the dust. The reason that I'm down here again is yes, it's cool to have a room, but also to the right over here, there should be an entrance to five lower levels of the mine. Five levels that have not been explored by anybody living. The hope is that by digging through the collapses that I have to do to get to those levels, I can come back to a relatively dustless area. There's an area that once upon a time I went to and a little bit of Galena. I'm wondering if the Galena is still there. Do a little exploring. I'm going to show you guys more of the 900 foot level. I'm going to see if we can't find a couple of new things. We're back at it. We're exploring. No matter how many times I've done it, it just brings me joy looking through these things, trying to imagine what used to be here. Brings back memories of when I was down here with Dave Sparks and Heavy D were browsing around or the first time I was down here. Right after I had hit a million subscribers, I brought my plaque down here to preserve it. Let's see what that looks like after a couple of years now. Wow. Way more water is dripping here than I've ever seen before. That might mean that my plaque looks extra special now. Here you go. If you're wondering what is a YouTube plaque that's put 900 feet down in an abandoned mine looks like after two or three years, there's your answer. Thanks to you guys. That will remain. I know there's an upshoot that one time I went up a little bit. I want to go up more. Looks like I had started going up this little tube here. See down below. Found a little pocket of Galena there. Chiseled most of it out, but a couple of little bits remain. It's really good. Malachite has right in there. It's the blue and green. We'll chisel a little bit more of this out. See if we can't bring it back up and refine it a little more. But hey, any day you find Galena, it's a pretty good day. Now it's time to do the slip and slide down. This is way steeper than it might look on a GoPro. See actually if I can get some of that beautiful Galena. Is that green? It's really good stuff in here. That was like a timbered shaft almost over that way. You see all the timber? What do we got here too? We got, oh, look what we got. This is exciting. This is cool. We have an old drill steel. And the crazy thing about this is I've never seen a bit without fully rusted. So that's what it more looked like there. See that little steel? So this would be a drill bit that would drill into the rock to pipe the dynamite later. All the way down this. Look at that blue. Oh, look at that azurite. Oh, that Malachite. Look at these little pockets even over there. If I can sneak over there without falling down this hole. Oh, it's kind of cracked. I don't know if you can get that piece. See, if I had that steel, I definitely could. Started decorating my room down there. Look at that. Look at all those colors in that. You got blue up here, some green, some red, some other color green. That is some blue. I've never seen that much azurite in one place. It's huge too. This might be my favorite little tube that I've gone into. There's just so much. Oh, look, there's Galena inside of the green. And this Galena is all of this tubes, this whole tube. They were just chasing the chase in a vein. When it comes to the logistics of living up here, reliable power is probably right underneath reliable water as far as the top of the list. And the power goes out here a couple of times a year. It's not if it's going to go out, it's when it's going to go out. And so I am very excited that recently I added this into the mix. This is an Anker Solix 3800. And this thing is just a beast. It's 6,000 watts. It has 120 and 240 hookups, and it can just power not just a couple of appliances. This thing could power the whole bunkhouse for a week at a time if I needed it to. There's solar panels on a sunny day like this. You can plug it into a car if you need to. And this thing has just added the peace of mind that I needed living in a place like this. If you're interested, they're offering 22% off an order. All you have to do is use the code that you see on the screen. I also put it down in the description. I put a link in the description. This thing is amazing. It has just changed the game for us up here. And I hope you guys check it out. So behind me is probably the main project up here at Cerro Gordo over the past four years. This is the rebuilding of the American Hotel here. And it's very hard to believe it's been almost four years since we lost the old hotel and the rebuilding began. And when I look at this thing, I just remember all the steps along the way. I think about every single one of those blocks in the basement that had to be loaded down the bottom of the mountain brought up here. I think about the concrete underneath those blocks that I poured with Dave Sparks and a bunch of others, or all the wood that had to come up, the framing that happened, the steel beams inside of that. There's just a thousand memories locked up in this place and hundreds of people that I've met. And so let's talk about the latest with the American Hotel. All right, let's talk power. So I need to go from here, trench all the way over to the back of the hotel there, because the last thing I want is another power pole in town. Aesthetically, I think it takes away from a lot. So we're going to go underground. You should come down here, trench down there, all the way over there. That's what we're about to do. All right. And just like that, we have our trench. We need a pad mount transformer box here. That's then going to power the entire hotel. We're going to be rocking and rolling. Weather's great. Time to make some serious progress on the hotel. We're just waiting for the power company to come out, put in the line, put in the transformer box and the power source will be good to go for the American Hotel. The roofer is coming any day now. We're going to put on the permanent roof. I think that by the time I make the next month update video, the roof is going to be done. The siding is going to be here. Windows are going in. The electrician has been here over the last few weeks making his plan for this first floor. And the big hurdle right now is a plumber. If you are a commercial plumber or you know a commercial plumber, I would love to hear from you. Once again, the hotel is just an exercise in patience for me and knowing that these projects take time and trying to zoom out a little bit. But I think that there's always, you know, that idea of controlling what you can control. And sometimes when I can't control, you know, the big project like the hotel, I focus on little projects. I did a lot of that over the last few months as well. And so while the hotel gets most of the attention, most of the thought, most of the focus, a bunch of other stuff has happened around the town, not just in the last few months, but in the last four years. You know, this building I'm sitting in right now didn't even exist four years ago when I moved here. Or the dynamite vault that we turned into a library up by the hoist house. Or the hunter studio that we're making into a recording studio. All of these things together have just changed the town. And these past few months, I've really been focusing on a couple of small projects that will change my experience here too. It is time once again to try to grow a garden up here in Cerro Gordo. This will be my third attempt. And this time we have these items. I never have any fruits and vegetables up here because it's so hard to get veggies up here. So why not grow my own? And in our first trench is going to go my most consumed vegetable. That is broccoli. So I want to get these seeds in, get them watered, and in a couple of months we're going to have some veggies. All right, we got the broccoli, the brussel sprouts, and the corn so far. That's going to be it today. We keep adding on to this and now we wait. Something that always seemed like it'd be very cool to have up here is a little pond, a little water feature. Obviously we don't have tons of water to play with. And so before I built a huge lake or anything, I thought it'd be nice to try a little small one. I'm interested over time what will happen, you know, like what animals will return first. I said we can give it a shot and you know, hey, it's a pond in the desert. What could go wrong? Experiment number one for the pond did not work. I just used this plastic that we had laying around the town and I think it got punctured. So we lost the water. But the good news is I bought an actual pond liner for the felt. So tomorrow I'm going to whip this up. Even having this little bit of water here feels good. And so once you get a little landscaping going on, this area is going to transform. Now we're cooking. Now we got the felt down, the liner down, time to stack some rocks in here. And this pond's coming to life. Can't wait to see what animals come back and what happens here. Should be a nice feature amidst all of this, which we're getting there. And just like that, we got some plants. We got the broccoli growing, Brussels sprouts, corn is looking great. Corn's gonna be knee high by the 4th of July. That's the goal. We got zucchini just killing over here. Spinach is coming in. We got pumpkin giving a strong showing. This box, nothing. I wonder if the soil in this is just no good. But look at this cork. We're making it happen. Over here, if we go beyond the boxes, pond liner is down, rocks going in. This is the year. This is the year I'm actually going to get some harvest out of this garden. We're going to get a pond going. We'll get some animals back. There's going to be a little Shangri-La here at Cerro Gordo. One thing you will not see very many of around Cerro Gordo, at least the town core, is trees. The main trees up here are pinyon pines and juniper trees. And you'll see none here in town because a hundred years ago, miners were chopping down any tree that they could see for firewood, for charcoal, for building materials, or just to get them out of the way. And it always makes me a little sad. I thought this place could look so cool with more trees on it. You know, if you go over the saddle that way, immediately there's trees, you know, it's just a different setting completely. And to take that quote, they say the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. And the second best time is today. So I bought some pinyon pines. We're going to put these right around here and I'll update you each year when they're one inch taller. And listen, I don't think it's good to name pretty much anything after me. It's not my goal, but I'm going to say this. If these little trees become a forest right here on this ridge, call this little forest on the ridge right here, Underwood Forest. You can see I got them all the way up the hillside, got a little pool around each one. We are going to watch as these grow and grow and grow. So yes, one day right here on this ridge with this view of the town, Underwood Forest. One thing I have wondered about for a very long time is what miners back in the day would have, you know, I've seen headlines for meat markets up here, for breweries down in Lone Pine, for restaurants up here. I even got this inventory list from January 1st, 1919 of this exact general store we're in right now that talks about all the different items for sale. And so luckily this month I had a friend of mine, Max Miller, who is one of my favorite YouTubers. He has tasting history with Max Miller. He came up, we filmed a couple videos and I was able to talk to him about what the typical cuisine might have been like for the miners up at Cerro Gordo. So the big question is, where are they eating and who's doing the cooking? Are they out near the mines? Because then they're going to have really basic food. They often said it was the three B's, beans, biscuits, and bacon. You know, they'd have flour, they could make biscuits either with sourdough, which a lot of miners kept with them. They kept some sourdough or they would use celeritus, which is basically baking powder. Their bacon was usually salt pork. It's basically like raw bacon, but it has so much salt in it that it stays preserved. So you have to soak it over and over and over to get enough salt out. And even then it's really salty. They had something called the free lunch, which was a staple of saloon culture. And you would go in and pay for a drink and then you got to eat lunch for free. And the idea was, you're going to buy more drinks and we're going to make our money back. And that didn't always happen, which is the same thing today. You go into a bar and it's pretzels and peanuts and stuff. Can you tell us a little bit about like, where do oysters fit into the mining culture? That's kind of an interesting thing. In the middle and through the end of the 19th century, in all of the United States, oysters were huge. Back East, you had like the oyster craze, where they were just wiping out entire beds of oysters in a matter of years. And that happened here too, in San Francisco. In 1849, there were huge oyster beds around San Francisco. And by the end of 1852, gold rush, by the end of that year, they were completely gone. And there was actually, there's a dish that is kind of known as the quintessential, I struck it big dish. When you found your gold or your silver, you would go get a hang town fry. And what that was, was scrambled eggs that were cooked in bacon fat and mixed with oysters. Yeah. I just love that. Like even those little insights into the past, bring it to color is the way I would look at it, more than in the past. So I think that's just awesome. And if you guys are interested, Max actually just made two or three videos about the cuisine in American mining towns. So you check out his channel and yeah, thanks for coming up. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. This has been awesome. You know, it's really cool being able to learn from all these different people. I think that learning isn't something that just comes by chance. You kind of have to seek it out. And then once you have it, you have to act upon it in a way. So if you're out there and you think of any people that might be able to come up and lend a little bit of expertise, I'd love to know, but it was great having Max up this month and I can't wait to have more people up in the future. Another very exciting thing that has happened in the last few months is that my book, Ghost Town Living, came out. And thanks to all of you guys, it hit the New York Times bestseller list, it hit the USA Today bestseller list and a lot of others. And it's just very exciting. You know, growing up, books have always been a big part of my life. And there's always that little bit of me that wanted to write a book that I'd always push down deep. But thanks to Sara Gordo, thanks to all you guys, I feel like I finally had something to talk about, something to say. And it's a very weird feeling writing a book because you work on something for over a year trying to encapsulate the last three years of your life. And then you put it out, and then it's no longer yours. And so for me, I tried to schedule some events around the launch week. You know, I knew I was gonna be nervous. I didn't think being up here pacing by myself inside my cabin would be a good idea. So I had an event in Austin, Texas. I had one in Los Angeles. And eventually I had one here in Bishop, California, just about an hour north of me. And it was awesome. I just really enjoy meeting people offline. And last night, I was looking through my journal from my first month up here. And there's an entry from March 25, 2020. And it said something to the fact, it would be cool to develop a writing skill. I think it'd be really nice to be able to put my words together. But for now, I'm tired. That was kind of the extent of it. And it's cool to think, you know, over four years later, I'm sitting here in a library that exists now at Sara Gordo and having a book out. So thank you guys so much. If you haven't yet, check it out. It's got some great stories. I'd really appreciate it. But yeah, I just wanted to share the news that was all possible. Thanks to all of you. One thing that's continued no matter what the year has been some explorations. And I try to make myself almost go on these because I think on these projects, you got to remember what excites you. We're headed out that way. And we're going to check out to see if we can't find some areas I've never been to before. All right, now we're hiking. We're out in an area where I have never been. So this is very cool. And there's very few places that I feel that's ever this quiet or that I almost feel a little bit like spooked, even being the middle of the day. There's just something eerie about being so far from people. So kind of being the canyons narrowing. I feel like this used to be a great place where some of the previous populations would hunt. From my understanding, they would kind of herd animals into a chute like this, stand above and hunt them from above. And if they did that, oftentimes they would make petroglyphs on the rocks, you know, paintings of what they killed. Maybe as a remembrance, as an offering, as a way to be remembered. The canyon's kind of steepening up on me again. Sometimes this can mean there's a waterfall. I don't know if that's the case. It's very pretty when it does this. At the end of the line, we've come upon a very big waterfall, the likes of which I don't want to walk down. It makes some great climbing though. This is what happens when it starts getting a little steep around the edges. A lot of times what you'll get. That is cool. Look here, right at the top of this cliff, skeleton, maybe a sheep, maybe a donkey. I bet what happened is they walked down the wash, got to the same cliff, couldn't get down. That's pretty haunting. A long time ago, that's bleached. This is the bottom. Sheep, mule, anybody know? Over there, I was sitting up here. If you look very closely, you'll see some cribbed rock, which would mean a mine. And below it, you see some timbering. But I wonder if this was a mule from a mine that when they left, they just left them here. Spooky. The other context clue I saw is behind this, in the rock, way down here is that. This must have been the road up and around. They could have come in from Sailing Valley up to the mine using the wash too, just to avoid this cliff. Let's scramble over there. See if we can get a little closer to the mine. Maybe see more of these guys over there too. There's definitely was a trail at some point and this wash must have gone away, but we're getting closer. You can see the cribbing there of whatever that was. It doesn't look like to be much left. This could have been a portal back in the day, an entrance into the mine. This could have been a chute where they're loading the mine into something, but not a lot here these days, but it's crazy. Just when you think, you know, I was just saying, oh, it feels so cool to be so alone in the middle of nowhere. Boom. Humans have been here before. There are shark teeth fossils all the way up here at 8,500 feet at Cerro Gordo. That is something that I just read in the Merriam report, a USGS report from the sixties. It was pointed out to me by Robert Sloan. So we're going to get my dirt bike. I don't know exactly where it is. We have to guess based upon what the Merriam report was talking about. So I'm gonna go take a route, see if we can find any fossils, hopefully some shark teeth. How crazy would that be? So let's go. All right. I probably have about 30 minutes, maybe 25 for the sunsets. So we had a little bit of waste. I don't know if we're going to find these shark teeth tonight, but if we do, that would be very cool. There's nothing else to get a pretty good view of the sunset. We can give it a shot. All right. So I'm basically where I wanted to go. This is again, just a guess. It could be anywhere around here, but I'm finding some stuff. There's a lot of shale obviously. I'm just picking up rocks and looking at them. Um, this, I mean, is this a fossil? You see that kind of like iron looking circle? That, this feels like a sponge or like a bone almost, but it's got this, it almost feels like foam. Very light. It's perfectly circular on one side. Take that back, ask some people what that might be. Today might just be a scouting mission. There's a bone. Maybe the only thing I did find was a bone. I'm going to keep hunting. I think this could be a nice evening activity because if you look, not a bad sunset. Not bad at all. All right. Don't think I found any shark teeth, but I found a lot of something that I think is interesting. All this shale, I kept finding these like rounded bits. Most of the stuff I see up here is like jagged, broken off. It's kind of like this, these, all these rounded edges that don't feel natural to me. And they're very light. So I don't know what this is. I'm going to bring it back to town and try to see if Steven, the town manager who studied geology, knows what those are. But these are the, Ooh, look, it's another thing. See, Oh wow. Look, it's like a held something inside of it. It's the same kind of bone-ish material. I wonder if I break that open, if it had something in it like that. See that there was almost like a, like formed around something else. It's like dirt inside. I wonder if this is like the insect that makes this feels almost like a nest or something gross. This stuff is like clay. See, it just broke again. Oh, look, this one's got a hole in it too. What the heck is this? I'm going to bring these back and we're going to investigate further what these could be. Brief update. They were all discussed. And this actually is a fossil of a shell. So I did find a fossil first time out, no shark teeth. These things are interesting. Apparently there's something in them that dissolved away, but I think I'm onto it. I found a fossil of the shell in that spot. There could be the teeth there next. So stay tuned. These past few months are the first time in my experience up at Cerro Gordo that part of the experience feels like a long time ago. Meaning if I look at a video from four years ago now, I can barely remember what I was thinking, feeling, doing outside of what was captured in the video. Beyond that, it just feels kind of like segments now, almost like when you were in high school or college and there was freshmen, sophomore, junior, senior. It kind of feels like that, which is crazy because I've been up here longer than either of those experiences. I think that's why coming out here and like seeing these fossils is, it's kind of important. You know, the last, when I cracked this rock open, last time the dirt inside of it saw the sky was hundreds of millions of years ago. And to me, it just helps remember the interconnectedness of everything, you know, of us, of our connection to the dirt under our feet. I think that's what we're all looking for in some way, whether it's more recent and we're looking up our family history about how do we fit in, how are we connected, you know, or way in the past, if we're debating the origins of the cosmos and all of that, or the in between, which would be fossils, you know, everything is connected. And I think the differences, the fossils that just get to leave behind their remains, humans get to leave behind their actions every single day. And that's what we leave behind more than anything else, more than remains is our actions that impact the world around us, that impact every other person that's around us and all the way from the top to bottom. And it's beautiful in a way, it just feels very empowering that you do get to leave that imprint, that mark, that reminder, not just in remains in a rock, but in your actions every single day. So four years into living up at the mountain, that is what I'm thinking about, as what these fossils are reminding me of. And that is what I'm leaving you with in this video. And I just wanna say thank you again. You know, this has been an amazing four years. I'm very much looking forward to the next four years and the records that I'm able to leave behind in these videos and elsewhere. I hope you guys have an amazing week. Get out there, check out your family history, check out fossil history, think about the cosmos, whatever you need to do, make good decisions. And I'll see you guys next time.