I Survived the Insane Road to an Abandoned Ghost Town

This is an abandoned ghost town, or at least it was abandoned until this man bought it for 1.4 million dollars. Armed with the excitement of seeing our first ghost town, the ignorance of what lay ahead, and a riding buddy with mistaken trust in me, we are going to Saragordo Abandoned Ghost Mining Town. I confidently led the way, expecting the town to be right on the side of the road like so many abandoned towns I had seen on this cross-country trip. What I didn't know was that the town sat 8,000 feet at elevation. It wasn't a town just on the side of the road. You had to traverse miles of steep and narrow dirt roads, and anyone afraid of heights is warned not to come at all. My experience level with bikes like mine on roads like this was about four days worth. Amanda was much more experienced, so I was slowing her down. She went ahead and we knew we'd meet each other at the top, or so we thought. As we climbed, temperatures plummeted, snow got thicker, the road was getting more and more difficult, and to think people used to do this on foot with mules. Winters at Saragordo are complicated. On the best days, it's the most beautiful the town ever is. And then I saw her. But on the worst days, winters at Saragordo can be hell on earth. Amanda was trapped under her bike, and I was the only one around to get this 500 plus pound bike off of her. I wasn't able to get the bike off of her, but I was able to move it just enough so that she could get her leg out from underneath. I did not know the road to Saragordo would be as gnarly as it is. Amanda was handling this much better than I was. I'm glad to see you smiling and walking. I was really worried you're... Oh, I'm fine. Look, I can do a dance. Oh, okay. Well, that was nothing. This was nothing? That was nothing. What? I've been in much worse, believe me. Are you kidding me? Oh, no. And then, when I tried to get back on my bike, this happened. It's like I dug real deep into the sand there. You get on or you want to walk it up there? Um, I think I'll walk it. Okay. Oh. I know of at least two riders that have gotten in accidents while wearing glasses. One ended up with a piece of glass lodged into her skull, and the other in her eye. Shout out to one of the companies I reached out to about sponsoring this three-month cross-country video series, because I want you to know about the safety item you may not even know you needed. These glasses are shatterproof, flexible, and the temples are thin enough that you can fit them comfortably in pretty much any helmet. Yes, they offer prescription and polarized and non-polarized versions. The link below will get you 10% off. I just wanted to come... I thought there's no way this could get worse, but I was wrong. As you may be able to tell, it is very cold up here right now, and you know, living in a ghost town is challenging on the best days, and in the winter it can just become extremely challenging. Mud and ice got thicker and thicker. We were stuck. We couldn't go any further. It's not exactly how you pictured it? No. And yet, by the kindness that comes when someone is living their dream, the owner still agreed to give us a tour. Welcome to Cerro Gordo. Thank you. This is an abandoned mining town. The town was established in the 1800s, 1865. The mining company that had at the time, they were paying a caretaker to be here just to look after the place. They went bankrupt, they couldn't pay him. They gave him the whole town as payment. I've been up here living up here full-time for about three years now. The property itself is about 350 acres, and it's surrounded by all BLM lands. There's no real neighbors anywhere. I've only recently, well I guess three years ago now, gotten into dirt bike riding. I saw you guys came out on bigger bikes than that. I am very jealous how good you guys were to get up here. I just wanted to come back. Want to trade? This is the original general store for the town. Oh my gosh. Yeah. They would leave that both lead and silver for a couple reasons, because one, the process of getting the silver out of the lead is pretty much the hardest part of that process, so they wanted to do that in San Francisco. And the second reason is that if those were pure silver bars, like every bandit in the west would just rob the stagecoaches leaving here all the time. Back used to be a butcher shop. These days it's our like war museum. We can check that out. So all this is like things that we found around the property. There's a large Chinese population here when it was a mining town, so we found a variety of like old Chinese coins and tin boxes. At its peak, the town had like 4,000 residents. Dynamite boxes that I found. This came from the 700-foot level down in the Union Mine. So if you're ever walking through the desert and you see like a tobacco tin nailed to a piece of wood, it probably has, it might have like a really old piece of paper inside of it that shows like whose mine that was back in the day. So originally this was like a mechanic's garage, so the center piece was the entirety of it, and then slowly they added on the wing, and then the old owner made it into, or put in the stained glass in remembrance of his wife who passed away, and so we're making it into a little bit of a movie theater. They like kind of have like a film contest even, you know, people come up and film something in the air here, but we'll see if we have some snow coming in. I love the disco ball on the stained glass. It seems that we have some snow issues to deal with too to keep that around. Oh no! Got a problem, it appears that the door is open to the assay office, because a lot of snow is going to get in there. You can see the drips. So a lot of times right now we have self-guided tours, people sometimes leave the door open, but snow inside of buildings equals moisture inside buildings, each one was rock, so I'm gonna have to get all this snow out of here. Because eventually we, I hope to host people overnight, you know, to have kind of this as the destination thing, because we're building a hotel just over here. With all the snow, we couldn't access many of the other buildings. What's your favorite building in Zaragoza? Probably the museum, and then I like the the hoist house, so the building that hosts the big mine shaft. I'm taking that 150 year old cage 900 feet down into an abandoned silver mine. I think the whole mood in the cage turned from one of great excitement of what's below, of oh ----, I hope we can make it back up. Just because of the history there, it's really cool. The photo in the general store here of one of the old owners in the late 1800s or 1900s is taken at this exact point on the 900 foot level, where this black and white sign is, that shows different things about the different levels. There's a sign that's still there, that was incredible. Well if it wasn't so much snow, there's some really cool routes to ride around here, you know. There's like, if you were to go, if you were to continue on our main road six miles that way is Death Valley National Park, and then you can take that through everywhere. These buildings over here? Yeah, there's little cabins, and so you have to figure like, originally there was so many people living here that any of these old roads that you see would have been lined with cabins and tents and houses. The hotel, and so like, we finally finished the basement, which is really big, and so now we're framing, and so there'll be dirt around all of that. We luckily have an old military truck, a five ton, so we bring everything up with that. I don't know if you guys watch Heavy D's videos ever? Oh, Heavy D Sparks? Yeah. Yes. So he's, he helped out. Oh, cool. Pour a lot of the concrete with this and stuff, so that was cool. He's the one that gave us the old five ton military truck. Well, we gotta leave Cerro Gordo. We're trying to leave before the sun sets so we're not here in the cold and the snow and starting to turn to ice, so it's just luck. Sometimes I feel like wind only exists to remind us that things can always get worse. It was so cold. Our cameras did not survive the ride down, but thank God we did. I never, ever, never, never, never, never. Of course. Thank you so much. Of course. Thank you guys for coming. I'm so sorry for not being convenient. No, it's not inconvenient at all. Beautiful pavement. It's never looked more beautiful. You did it! Oh, God. We had fun. Did we? That playground can become a prison, but when those days are past, they definitely make you appreciate the things we take for granted. Next week, we'll be somewhere warmer. In the middle of the desert, staying overnight in another piece of history. 40 feet below ground in a decommissioned missile bunker.