A Year Alone In An Abandoned Ghost Town

hello howdy my name is brent and this is cerro gordo once upon a time this used to be the largest producer of silver for the state of california something like 000 miners called these hills home and together they pulled 500 million dollars of minerals out of the mountain for the past 12 months this has been my home this is one year at cerro gordo [Music] so right here is pretty much where this year at cerro gordo began you know the night that i was coming into town i was coming up the road and it was snowing and i was in my little two-wheel drive tacoma and it started slipping and sliding right on this turn and made it right to about here to where he got stuck completely and i left it there and i hiked into town in my all-bird sandals and that kind of summarizes how prepared i was for this whole adventure you know i was in a truck that definitely couldn't survive the snow and shoes with no traction either and so it's been a big change it's been a big change but i thought a nice place to start would just be walking through town and kind of showing the different projects that i've been working on for the past year and some of the progress [Music] at first you know being marooned on this mountain was an adventure that's what i was looking for and that's what i got you know it was it was an amusement park built by nature and i had it all to myself i didn't have to face these daily anxieties of the pandemic that all my friends back in austin had to you know there was no worries that somebody sick had just touched a door handle right before i was there and so i felt free and excited you know i even started this youtube channel to document everything from my friends back home why hello [Music] all right it's day two here at cerro gordo made it up in the middle of the night through the blizzard uh yesterday was it's snow it was really cold hoping it warms up a little bit but uh it's hard to beat the scenery here so just gonna try to work on some things that i want to learn you know how to use this camera a little bit more reading more writing more hanging out so uh we'll see and i was having the time of my life you know but i think as the weeks turned to months you know cerro gordo became much more than just this carefree escape you know i went from being stranded by weather to secluded by choice you know i didn't want to leave i felt almost that i couldn't leave because the more i learned about the history of the town the more i felt a part of it so this is the original general store here at saragodo victor beaudry opened this thing up in 1868 and when i first came here i was staying in the bellshot house which is located right there and so by no other function than how close it was this is my first project and when we bought this place the general store was basically just used for storage especially the back room this front room was the old general store and in the back was the butcher shop now when we purchased it this back room was home for anything and everything unwanted in saragora's past and so to even open that door was impossible it was just floor to ceiling storage i'm talking old couches you know boxes of halloween decorations from 2008 sunset magazines from 1990 as well as some really cool old artifacts but the cleanup happened started out here you know when we got in here there's all sorts of stuff kind of over here and so for the first few weeks it was just sorting through everything getting an inventory of what was here and seeing what should stay and what should go and so now there's a bit more curation this is kind of my favorite spot to sit and film some videos but you know spent some time and curated this front room for things that were already here on the property over here you can see we have some merch now um the same thing just cleaning up these shelves dusting sorting through even behind these i mean even every bit of this was a stuffed you couldn't even walk back here this room might be among my favorite in all cerro gordo so again when we got this you couldn't even open this door pure storage floor to ceiling and then over many many weeks sort through this stuff some say someone leave these glass cases were here back in the corner so brought these out and started displaying some things that i found back in the mines you know when people ask me you know why do you back in the mines why do you you know seemingly risk your life for stuff like old powder boxes it's for exactly this reason it's to display it and so hopefully many generations of people can learn from all the different items found you know if i think about the past year and new skills or hobbies i've taken on probably the biggest one has been mining you know mine exploration is something that i didn't do that much of growing up believe it or not i didn't have mine to my backyard and i think even you know for the first year owning cerro gordo you know you go 100 feet back into a mine just to say you went into one stay strong tripod we'll go the rest without you [Music] we're pretty deep now we're having to use my cell phone light for light so i think i'm going to turn around but it's really beautiful back here it's peaceful make a great cheese cellar wine rack bobcat den all sorts of fun things but being up here for a year and you know only having so many things to do i started just pouring over all these maps and these geology reports and just learning everything i could about every mine up here and with that came with curiosity to go and check these things out myself exploring them as a dictate especially if you're finding historic relics and you really quickly realize that if you're willing and able to go to places that others aren't your chances of finding those relics are so much higher and to me the artifacts and the history is what it's all about you know every artifact tells a story so does every mind shaft and understanding each allows me to piece together a more complete understanding of the history of serogordo and relay that history in context to future generations look at that you see it how crazy is that so what we're looking at here is a map of the main union mine here at cerro gorda and looking at this it brings back all sorts of good memories over the past year you know right here at the zero this is the hoist this is where the cage is from 1865 that slowly lowers you down into the all the different levels of the mine so i took that hoist to get into things like the 200 level in the early 1870s somewhere around 30 miners died in a collapse at the 200 level and their bodies were never recovered and because of that and a bunch of other reasons the shaft entrance to the 200 level was boarded up it was collapsed behind it so we stopped at the 190 with the hopes of sneaking through this piece of wood and then digging our way through the collapse in all right all right we're even down to the 700 level where the water is your time right now is 132. all right is the crew going down that craig johnny of course of course let's look just like 700 level of cerro gordo here's the pump this is how we get water here at cerro gordo back to the actual stump the water source leaving all the way back here to where serogoro gets water look at that it's incredible my goal with a lot of my other explorations was to find a different way into this maze of mines without having to use this cage because the cage requires a team of four to six people you know you gotta convince four to six guys to spend their day to lower you down to explore and so when i realized that i started looking for other ways in and when i found this map tucked away in the old general store i noticed stuff like the buena vista tunnel goes right in the omega tunnel goes directly in the bullion appears to go in and so i started knocking down all these leads to see if i could find a way to explore all this without having to take up so many people's time so the omega for the longest time was just a rumor to me i was told that it was over the saddle and the approximate location of it and that it led as you can see right into the 200 level and so i started on the omega months ago and i tried everything at first i thought it'd be a thing of i moved her aside some rocks and suddenly this massive tunnel would reveal itself that ended up not being the case so robert the caretaker here came back and he's a certified dynamite blaster so we stuffed this with a bunch of dynamite fire in the hole still didn't get in so then i put my new found backhoe skills to the test and i dug this thing almost every night for a month after months of digging i dug straight down and old timbers revealed themselves to be a mega tunnel unfortunately they revealed itself right around the same time that i had to return the loader to the rental company you know i was using the loader just on the off hours when i wasn't using it for the hotel rebuild and so i couldn't justify paying the rental fee just to indulge myself of trying to get into the omega but a company has offered to give me a loader again so soon very soon in my second year here i think i'm gonna get it i think the omega tunnel is one of the first big explorations i'm gonna do in year two and it's all gonna come from a backhoe especially when i look at something like this and i see the map and i see where it connects to i have to get into that thing then we go over to the bouillon tunnel and this was a that was about the most scared i've ever been in the history of mine exploration for me this was a two-part thing first time i tried to do here and i thought the stop might connect in that's so gross why is it dude you know that died probably something probably fell on it yeah for sure it looks like that rock crushed it that's what i'm saying it's like if that crushed that it could crush us yeah well what is it i don't know bobcat ew look at the blood like driplets on it look how big this cave is and so pretty quickly after that we came to the conclusion that whatever entrance may have been there has collapsed over the years the rocks have fallen to the point where it's inaccessible we came back another day to try to find this this connection into the 400 level and the idea there was you'd go back and this is pretty much at the zero level so 400 feet of ladder would lead you down to the 400 level [Music] did a rung just give out yes i felt thanksgiving too i just didn't get off of it but there's like six foot of ladder rungs out here did all these break on the way down yeah it's not six feet yeah is it really and then descend down with your december where right down this road see how all of these are missing yeah and then once you get down there it's open again i mean where can we if that rope ladder can get us almost all the way there look at i'm putting all my weight in the world on this beam i'm standing on yeah this rope ladder will get us there easy we don't have to use it and johnny and i started down and i had the rungs of the ladder break from underneath me [Music] johnny no hold on man just give me a minute oh [ __ ] dude it was in the top three scariest moments of my life we re-root we came back another day and i remember going down we went down tons of ladders here down and down and down and down and down and finally after a few hours we hit the bottom and i remember we hit the bottom here which is crazy now looking at the map we were it was all adding up just as it should so we hit the bottom here we're at the bottom of the bouillon and lookie what we have here oh boy and then there was even track it was like finally you know after tons of searching i found the way into the union mine because as you can see that right there should just lead into all sorts of different things but no there's collapse say it ain't so no bomber the hell are these tracks going then it's me but [Music] and so that way was shut off and that was a whole other exploration so as you look around here if you look right around here you'll see that the zero tunnel potentially leads down into 400 and so a different day the exploration was circled around the zero and remember going back and right around where you think you'll connect there's a winds or a connection there's an ore box there and there's ladders i remember going down getting excited going down getting to the bottom of the ladders going and thinking that it was a dead end because there's tons of collapse it looked like it all stopped but i walked up over a hill and looked down and then a whole nother stop revealed itself so i was pumped up i went back regrouped grabbed johnny we went back here checked out the zero tunnel a second time went down went over repelled down and nothing that too was a dead end unfortunately avalanche so far my tries to get in to the union without using the hoist have been unsuccessful but i'm not done if you look here you have the buena vista tunnel there's the safeguard over here and of course there's the omega so there's still options out there i'm still confident that you know year two i'm gonna find my way in all right so from the general store probably the next two projects i spent time working on was the chapel that was originally a mechanics garage that was just purely used for storage including the outside of it when i came here ago and originally this thing was owned by a guy named ned reddy and ned reddy was a gunslinger in fact he is a gunslinger with more confirmed incidences in the encyclopedia of western gunslingers than doc holliday wyatt erp johnny ringo or a lot of these infamous western characters and he owned a bunch of stuff at cerro guro he owned this garage he owned a saloon that used to be up there and he owned all sorts of other things in mining towns and so originally this building here was just the center part so if you see that center frame that was the mechanics garage there's even a pit underneath it this building over here this was the mule barn so as mules would come into town they would stage them in here and this structure used to have a wooden roof on top of it so this were all the mules that brought everything up here would stay you can't see where they would feed them and such so mule barn and as technology got better cars were a thing then ready's garage and a year ago i started this thing was floor to ceiling just junk it was a thing that people would store whatever they could not find another place for in here and that led to a lot of lot of work these days unfortunately i'm starting to use it as a similar thing as a storage but when i came in here there were stacks and stacks of wood everywhere in here and i moved it all out here sorted through it used a lot of it for other projects like the wood from here was the wood that i did the renovation to my writer's cabin that's just over that crest that we'll go to later and after that i just spent time cleaning it sorting it and one day my hope is that this is like a small screening room you know obviously somebody had the idea before i thought it'd be really cool to you know bring teams up here have them shoot videos around cerro gordo and then premiere them here we'll do the whole thing we're going to have you know the red carpet here with a rope and everybody's going to get dressed up i think it'll be hilarious to get super dressed up in a ghost town and you come in you know you give your ticket this is the kind of like the little counter or whatever the take a guy you come in here everybody mingles you know this is probably a little bar over here over in this wing i'll put a bar as well it'll be a bar over there and then the premiere happens that's the dream you know that's you got to have vision and dreams for these places that's what kind of keeps you going through the the long days and the long nights of labor but i have a bunch of hope for this for now it's you know disco central um and it's also staging so all this weather you see is being sorted for different projects and the majority of this wood you see it's very thick this one is all taken out of mines and so this is old growth true you know two inch thick lumber that i'll put to use maybe i'll build the bar out of it you know i think a bar back here would be very cool you know use this corner bar peel mingle before the premiere that's the hope that's the dream like i said you gotta have some dreams keep these things alive but that was one of my big projects over the last year i know it doesn't show as much maybe on camera but it was a lot of physical labor moving all this stuff around [Music] to get over to the little writers cabin we're gonna take one of my favorite purchases of this year the polaris you know when i came up here a year ago i definitely didn't have this i thought about it for so long and finally pulled the trigger and it's funny it just opened up so much more of the property to me but you know there's trails that that truck just can't get to and so to have this i've been able to do everything you know go on trails to mines i wouldn't have been able to go otherwise and it's just fun you know one of my favorite things to do is just to unplug put on some music turn my phone to airplane mode and i just take this thing and cruise and i've experienced some of the most beautiful sights and beautiful sunsets of my life [Music] this is it my hideaway from the hideaways my escape from the escape my ghost town within a ghost town and let me let me first point out something i'm not trying to brag but i did create this deck for my very first project here at cerro cordo i knew nothing about building a deck but let's see a year later pretty sturdy you know all this wood came from that church that i was showing so it's pretty good and before when you go in here it's completely undecorated and there's no ceiling so all this is new i mean it's new to this it's not new wood obviously and then a small a little bit of decoration threw in this mattress and the only place it would fit and of course the writer's desk complete with you know mouse droppings but i think i'm gonna spend a lot of time in this over the next couple days you know it has become my place to kind of reflect rather than the sunset spot so sit here look out that window and just think about everything that's been going on for the past 12 months there's that jimmy buffett quote that says i spent a day trying to recall the whole year i think that's what i'm going to do today so shout out jimmy buffett that's a little little known secret that you may not know about me i'm actually a massive parrothead uh which is jimmy muffins fans so if you like jimmy buffett let me know your favorite song below actually even more of a big reveal i have one tattoo and 100 of my tattoos are jimmy buffett related you know it took me a few months to settle into the fact that cerro gordo was going to be the project you know the one that i was willing to work on from sunup to sundown and for a long time that's just what i was doing you know i would wake up before the sun rose and start cleaning the general store and then i'd find my way to bed well after midnight after painting the bunkhouse walls for hours and i truly felt in that time that i was firing on all cylinders and giving it my all you know the end of the day would just bring that beautiful feeling of exhaustion that i knew i'd put in an honest day's work and i would do it all again the next day and then the american hotel burned down and i remember that night i was sleeping in the bellshot house and i woke up to what i thought was fireworks you know there's this loud popping and when i looked at my window i saw the side of the hill glowing i i put on my slippers you know i went to the front window and that's just kind of when my heart dropped i saw the hotel fully engulfed i remember physically pinching myself really hard to make sure that it wasn't a nightmare it was among the most devastating moments of my life you know it's something to come out and see your hopes dreams life savings and what you work towards literally go up in flames in front of you and you know the weeks that followed were very trying you know they're some of the most trying in my life but i do think that on the other side of that i grew a lot you know for better or worse the fire of this past year is part of star wars history there's nothing that i can do that will bring it back outside of rebuilding it and one of the first things that comfort me was the old owner of cerro gordo visited the day after it happened and as soon as i saw him i just burst into tears because i felt like i had let him down in some way you know i remember he kind of looked at me shook his ted and told me that it was meant to happen and that for better or worse this is part of cerro gordo's history now you know and that it was up to me to write the next chapter you know it was time for me to put my own thumbprint on the town's history i doubled down or tripled down after that you know every waking moment was about the town about making sure what was here remained and what was lost was rebuilt and as i started down that path i found this level of support that i've never seen or felt before you know from viewers of this channel and friends and even strangers from the surrounding area i think sometimes it takes a tragedy to bring people together and that's what seemed to happen after the fire you know people who were on the sidelines before watching suddenly jumped in to help you know they donated their money their time and their skills to help with the rebuild and that support is really what got me through that time you know i'll never forget the people who were there during that it made me truly realize the importance of being there for people in the time of need and in the months since i've i've really made it a point to check in with friends and family more than i did before the fire you know to try to be there for anyone that i know that's going through a hard time rebuilding and seeing progress on the hotel brings me a level of comfort you know i'm not sure that i fully dealt with the fire emotionally and it's still hard for me to talk about it sometimes but each step towards the new hotel helps ease that pain a little bit for the last number of months i've been full steam ahead of getting this thing rebuilt and making sure that it stands for hundreds of years so many generations of people from now can come experience the hotel and learn from the history here the fire also brought me a lot closer to the town you know understanding its past became even more important to me while rebuilding its future and rebuilding a hotel from scratch zoomed my focus way out to create something not just for my time here but for generations of people to enjoy and that's a mentality that brought to the property in total i think one of the most amazing things this year and something that i never take for granted is just how much this channel has helped rebuild this town you know bring life back to it i'm sitting right now on six trees that are rough milled into perfect two-inch lumber that was donated by somebody who watches this channel and you know beyond that we've had volunteer labor skills expertise materials and equipment all donated by people that watch this channel so i thank you guys so much you know this is unbelievably kind of everybody and i do want you to all to know that you even just watching this are helping rebuild cerro gordo and i think that's cool you know i think there's a lot of communities online and this has become a community that is just so kind and supportive of each other and it's something that i didn't have last year and now you know i can't really think of being without so thank you guys so much for everything wood views anything thank you thank you thank you and if this is your first video you're watching anyone support sarah gordo i encourage you to subscribe to this channel every week i try to document my experience bringing this abandoned town back to life and your support would just mean everything so thank you all so much ah lola's palace a pleasure this is one of the original brothels here at cerro gordo at one point in time there were four now just one and this one if you were to have looked at it 12 months ago was leaning about like that and so it's a recent project but part of that was just to straighten that thing back up it had no back wall on it so put in a new back wall the hope here is kind of to create a museum part of the tour so create this kind of staged how it used to be and let people look around and this is my most recent project and one i'm most proud of this was completely gone this is basically just garbage and dirt and that wall was kind of laying on it and so over the past month or so i completely took out all this wood this is down to just dirt right here and i numbered all of the boards so i can put them back in order and then slowly i rebuilt the floor you know first was just leveling out the dirt then it was creating this frame then it's creating the box and it's about putting back in the joists and you know securing the joists if they need it to make sure support and then starting to put back on some of the floorboards at this point you can kind of see where the floor is going to be you know i think it's looking pretty great and you can even see the ghost mark of where the wall in between rooms was right there so my hope over the next month or two is to get this whole thing back to how it was you know walls and roof on it all you know put that back up so you can see the slant to try to mimic that and i was able to salvage a lot of the wood from the different walls so the idea is to make it look similar to this but just times three so boom one two three and then like i said decorate them a little bit so when people are taking a tour of the town it's just another part of the tour and that way people can get a sense of you know what it used to be like back in the day because previously there was something like 400 buildings here at cerro gordo it's hard to imagine now but this was main street that went down and there was tons of buildings before the town as you see it now and then up here if you would walk up any flat spot you see used to be a building there used to be a huge hotel here called the cosmetopolitan and there's another building here and you know if you get up on top of it and you look you can see that it was flat there's obviously wood still here so this is a big building same right above it another big building over here was the hotel as i mentioned and then above that another building and so if you look at it from this perspective and you see the grading and the levelness you can kind of start to imagine what cerebral must have been like with all that thing going on and what's crazy to me to think about is like these days i come over here for peace you know right now if i stop talking [Music] it's basically silent you know and so it's a very peaceful place that i come and i can reflect but back in the day it was basically the opposite of that you know you have to figure the mine up there was going 24 hours a day so it was 12 hour shifts so the miner's always going there's numerous smelters going so melting stuff with smoke in the air everywhere and these saloons and brothels were also opened all day and it's heyday there's something like a murder per week so you imagine just chaos you know like noise from the saloons noise from the from the mine noise from the brothels noise from the gunfights so it was just a very chaotic place and now it's very peaceful and i think the contrast is something that plays out often here at cerro gordo you know we're going to continue on our tour the bellshot house is the first house that i stayed in here done some cleaning too the gordon house cleaning as well and then that little cabin up there is almost done so i can't wait to show you guys the progress of that so this road going out to the cabin was a project itself a few months ago this road is the original yellow grade road that led into cerro gordo you know the road now is down there but that was the original one the original one was up here but over the course of 150 years it was overgrown and erosion had basically washed the whole road out if i wanted to work on this i needed a reliable way to get there so hence digging this road and while digging this road all sorts of treasures revealed themselves you know as you can see i had to dig down a few feet and as you dig down a few feet and just be thousands of people living here so you all sorts of stuff made itself available including 32 bottles in one small clump and as i kind of follow up to that story i was talking to an archaeologist and they're like oh did the bottles have a certain film on them and i was like oh yeah yeah they all did i said yeah that's that happens after about 100 years of organic matter on them so basically what i had found was an old outhouse that they had thrown the bottles in don't worry all the kind of germs have been gone by that point but kind of a funny little story about that what do you think is that like a cabin or what [Music] crazy stories if you look up there you see that hole so all this is recycled wood all this wood is from the 1800s and so in that hole up there as we're putting up the wood there's a bullet lodged into the wood and i'll show you guys a photo of it but after it's taken down we're looking at it and thought you know what it belongs back up there so the bolt is actually back up in the ceiling so this ceiling has an original pistol bullet from the 1800s in it just kind of adding to that character and lore of cerro gordo you know seeing all this wood up on the walls makes those long hikes out all worth it [Music] one of my favorite things over the last 12 months is getting to know the property more by hiking you know i think reconnecting with nature is something that i've really benefited from this year it's changed the way i live and think and feel you know we came from nature and it's so important to get back out there and be part of it it was one of the biggest things missing from my life when i was living in a city because i think nature just forces you to experience awe to be humbled to put your life and the situations within your life in perspective you know it's not easy thing to do when you're living in the city but out here the nature doesn't really leave you a choice it also reminds you of the beauty all around you you know every day i get a walk in the shadows of some of the most beautiful mountains in the world sit and look at this vast desert watch the sun hit the joshua trees in just the right way chase wild horses as they run along a stream i mean how can i ruminate on what's wrong with life in a setting like that it's impossible it breaks you out of whatever funk you might be in and it's my form of meditation you know almost every walk i just feel my muscles relaxing my heart rate dropping my thoughts generally get clearer and i can make connections between things that i've been struggling with you know my year here has confirmed one thing for me time in nature isn't a nice to have it's a must-have it isn't something that you make time for if you can you make time for your other things if you can i truly think it's that important and that said i still do like to set little missions for each of my hikes and this past week i set a big one i wanted to retrieve one of the hundred year old ore buckets that used to be part of the cerrogoro tramway i came across these buckets a few months ago when i walked the entirety of the tram they're beautiful but they're super heavy miles from the closest road and the side of a steep hill and at that time i said hey i might need some help and you all answered so this past weekend i made the trek back there with a few friends to see if we can get a few of these historic buckets back to town so tomorrow i am finally gonna go retrieve that ore bucket that i found on my tramway hike and the problem is it's about here on the side of a hill and the closest road is back here and the closest road to get to is there so what i'm trying to investigate now is where to leave a truck so the end of hiking this thing miles out we don't have to then walk up the road as well luckily my friend johnny will be here as well as a couple of volunteers that watch the channel to help with this expedition so what i think we're going to do is in the morning around 8 johnny and i will take the truck down dump it somewhere around here and then i'll take the razor and bring everybody as close as i can to this peak i'll have to hike down around and over to about here and then from there it's like a shale for a long time downhill and then just a long probably two mile hike up and over the desert to retrieve it it's gonna be quite the expedition but hey at the end we will have another official cerego ore bucket back in the town core [Applause] okay it's the mission today to achieve this ore bucket we got ryan and tim helping out and between the four of us we're bringing one of these back here yep looking good johnny looking like a psycho we're taking a little bit easier out this time got uh some new boots for the hike thank you whoever said these hocas they're pumped up early [Music] looking at this ore bucket and so this day started out with a plan in my head to go and retrieve these buckets from the side of a hill and i had a couple friends join me and we didn't know how long it was going to take because i couldn't quite remember the exact distances and as soon as we got there we kind of realized the trek ahead of us you know it would have been one half the distance just go back up the hill to where we started but that would have been going up a shale cliff so we decided to go with gravity downhill it turned into an adventure okay so there it is what do you think i think we got a long way to go i'd have to agree uh now looking at it it is a stretch and that one might down there might be in better shape actually now looking at it but this one has the label on it which i like you know shows the montgomery company you know at first we were slipping and sliding you try out all sorts of different ways of carrying these things you know upside down right side up four people carrying it three people carrying it one person carrying it over their shoulder sliding it down the mountain you know flipping it over the mountain any way we could to get these things down the mountain okay stop whipping me [Laughter] oh [ __ ] what do you think here dude [Music] [Music] i think we gotta flip it this and this thing is catching on the it's actually hurting us catching on the plants but then we flip it back over to this is that one easy oh is it okay [Music] um [Music] well i gotta exhaust all options i guess yeah and after a number of hours we kind of developed this system where we took one of the buckets apart to make it less heavy i always kept doubling back oh my hammer broke really break them down no no the rock broke who's carrying it i'll do whatever you know like somebody else doesn't want to do i don't care i'll do whatever johnny seems a sign to that so i'll grab one of these i mean i can do the bucket too i don't care i'll do whatever i just because we you know switch it rotate it people are getting tired you know we found this old water or oil bucket and that was probably three to four times heavier than the standard ore bucket that we had so what we would do is one person would walk ahead with the top of the ore bucket two people would walk behind with the bucket and then all of us would circle back and help with the water cooler and so it just became this thing of you know 100 yards ahead 100 yards back 100 yards ahead 100 yards back so we're really walking three or four times the actual distance we got all right yeah i'm ready [Music] to me bringing these ore buckets back to cerro gordo was saving a bit of history for future generations you know that's how i see a lot of these explorations for treasures up here as a race against time you know these things are going to get lost to the elements in the mines or on the side of the hill so there's an urgency to get them back to a safe place so more people can enjoy them and learn from them each item tells its own story and if i can better understand each item's story then i can better understand the story of the town as a whole and i can relay that to others so they can also benefit from the knowledge and i love more than almost anything learning everything i can about these items that i find and then being able to tell people who visit or even watch this channel about them you know i get great satisfaction out of that you know i think we all had a pretty good time it was you know an adventure of nothing else and at the end of the day when we finally got these things loaded into the truck and back at cerro gordo we all sat around and enjoyed a hard-earned beverage and talked about how the future generations would enjoy these ore buckets back at cerro gordo back in sarah gordo [Music] treasure is secured there we go i gotta say one of my favorite things of this year was all the animals cats included you know i got these cats not by choice really you know one day a rancher from up and bishop called me and said hey brent you want some cats i was like yeah like their mother died i'm gonna put him out in the field [Music] all right i was never a cat person growing up i've always had dogs so suddenly come here i found myself with all sorts of cats and they were so small i could hold them in my hand the first few weeks i had to bottle feed them and now look at them they're so big and it's really exciting you know i think i've spoiled them to the point where the point of that was supposed to be to go outside and be mousers you know and take care of things but now they're pretty pampered they live a great life inside i can't wait to see them kind of grow with the property over the coming years what's up guys [Music] how are you elon beretta tofu looking beautiful these guys came from a farmer outside of bishop and so one day i decided that i wanted goats because i've had goats before i had to go in austin texas when i lived there and there was just no life up here at all you know just me and nothing else so i wanted goats and so i called around i called the feed storm bishop it turns out the owner of that store had some baby goats and within a couple days later these guys were making their way back to sarajordo they're bore goats they're going to become 300 pounds and one day they'll just roam the countryside [Music] welcome to an undisclosed mine location undisclosed because i believe other than the union mine this mine is most likely to have the elusive levi genes i've been looking for and i believe that for a few reasons one they've found levi jeans here before that's a fact i know it it's coming from a very reputable source two in my expeditions in this mine i have found two pairs of pants neither levi's but both pants themselves and as i was looking through my footage from earlier this year i realized i had explored this mine but never shared so i'm gonna share with you the last time i went in here and i'll say this over the next year i'll be spending a lot of time in here my fingers are crossed this mine right here is where i'm gonna find those levi's but this was earlier this year with my friend johnny this mine is huge it's like a maze that never ends there's ladders up there's letters down there's ore shoots there's stops there's everything you could ever want back in the mine and it would take months probably to explore the whole thing when johnny and i went back there we focused on one area that i had found clothing in before there was a shoot an ore shoot going up to a different level that it seemed like the miners were just throwing their clothes down the chute and they're getting stuck in the chute and previously there i had found a bunch of shirts uh one pant leg and some other items and so given that johnny and i only had a few hours i focused in on just that area and it did not disappoint so we've got some potential pants in here here it's stuck in the chute we try to push it out and we got some pants on our hands i need to move this rock board the board's so thick though let me get the crowbar and get it out hopefully this rock doesn't break what is it oh it's not too much huh part of a pant leg though yeah i think that shirt was well think it's fine here yeah i like you going up okay it goes up always hello there hello coming up yeah come on up oh man there's a ledge right here it's super steep right here though like terrifyingly so the t-shirt but again they just wrapped around the shoot entrance for some reason or the shoot or they're throwing it down from above the chute oh it's almost loose yeah there we go i got a shirt oh i got buttons come on come on look look right above you oh yes i can get that and then if you look over there in the cracks over this way yeah there's like fabric all in the cracks even something that looks like denim look right above you i know yeah yeah so i'm gonna try to get it from up here but i'll let you do that first i don't rain rocks on you okay that's sketchy that's the whole shoot ladder right no this is uh yeah this is the shoot um i'm just gonna move it okay that might help get the t-shirt yeah it'll i mean help don't want to get anybody too excited too early but there's definitely some garments over here those are a lot of rock bluish in nature has a button on it that's very old and metal pretty bad shape a bunch of buttons buttons on jeans [Music] there's a another button so it had the metal buttons on there the question i get asked a lot is why would there be full genes back in the mine you know you can understand why there would be parts of jeans they would sew the end together to create a bag to maybe carry dynamite or tools you know cut some to wrap around pipes cut up squares to that ease the restroom and all sorts of other things but why oh why would people have full pairs of pants back in the mines a number of months ago i was able to speak to the historian at levi jeans and she told me an answer that in my mind is definitive so back in the days when they first made levi's they're made almost as like coveralls or overalls right so you put them over your regular jeans and you go to work and for that reason the levi's were owned by the mine they weren't owned by the miners so the miners would come to work put the levi's over their stuff at the end of the day take them off and leave them there and there usually be a mud room and there would be company boots back there as well as company jeans so sometimes if you find a lot of pairs of jeans in these holes in the mines that's because it was a mud room and that's amazing if i answer the question for it it makes sense and for me it leads my curiosity closer back to the union mine because if the union mine right next to the hoist house is the change room that's where miners changed every day so that must have been where the levi's were kept that's not to say that there weren't mud rooms in the union mine or there weren't mud rooms in this but i know that they changed there and i know they were levi jeans so over the next year i'm going to spend a lot more time kind of poking around the change room um but if you're wondering the reason that there's genes back in minds it's because the genes were owned by the company and the miners would change into the genes when they got to work and change out of them when they left work and so i'm going to keep the search alive i'm going to keep going for it but i wanted to share that information with you guys because i think it kind of answers a few questions people have been asking so you know there's a lot of beautiful things about living in an abandoned ghost town but there's also a few trade-offs you have to make and inconveniences to put up with including every week i have to drive down to my truck and fill up all this water from a town about nine miles away that takes up a decent amount of time anything you need to get is far away you think gas groceries hardware store supplies everything is a process and so as part of that you just start planning ahead more you know it kind of builds that self-reliance where you're not going to be able to run to home depot three times to complete a project you know if you want something for lunch tomorrow you better remember it a couple weeks before when you go on your supply run and so i've enjoyed that you know i've liked having to be a bit more purposeful and intentional about everything including my water supply and my food supply and everything else and i hope that i can kind of take that with me for the rest of my life but that's not to say that everything is fully enjoyable uh while the water is one thing i'll turn this around and show you guys something else that is how you use the bathroom here at cerro gordo and that would be an outhouse and so to give you an idea of the reality of says of cerro gordo let me show you the outhouse and this is the best outhouse we have this is that house with a view of mount whitney named outhouse magazines outhouse of the year five years in a row we're hoping for six this year fingers crossed windows get broke because the wind's insane and if you're gonna go in that's what you're working with every day for a year so just something to think about as you're considering living in an abandoned ghost town the realities of it the realities are it's beautiful it's amazing it's fun it's the time of my life but you're not gonna do things like just turn on the sink in the water work you're gonna fill up truckloads of water like this every week you're gonna have to plan your grocery shopping weeks in advance and that is going to be your bathroom every day 365 days a year i don't think any singular decision i've made in my entire life has impacted me more than buying sarah gordo you know it's one of these things that i knew at the time it was a big deal that it was a big jump for me but i could have never imagined the place that it would take me and i can't even imagine now places that could take me in the future and as i think back to that i just feel so grateful that i was able to have the opportunity to work on a project like this you know it's brought me a level of satisfaction and comfort and purpose and meaning that i've never felt in my entire life and it's one that has really forced me to become better you know to utilize all of my skill sets and even develop ones that i didn't have and i think it's very easy to stick with the path you're on you know i could have very easily stayed in investment banking for the rest of my life and even when i purchased cerro gordo you know i had already had two or three careers so this was later on in life and to be able to find something like this that ignites you and invigorates you in the way that a project like this does is just something that i'm hugely grateful for and i think after being here a few months i realized that it wasn't the town that was changing it was me you know i i fully started to realize the task at hand and accepting that this is going to be the project for a really long time you know my whole life even and i think that there's comfort in that level of commitment you know i had spent my life pinging from one project to the next searching for the one that would call on all of me you know require every ounce of energy and brain power and i hadn't found that before cerro gordo but after a month or so here it fully sank in that this is it you know this is what i'm looking for this is what i'm going to be spending all of my time on and once my mind settled into that notion everything got easier and harder at the same time you know easier in the sense that i didn't have to spend all this mental energy thinking about what project would come next but harder in the sense that i finally found that challenge i was looking for and it was time to truly test what i was made of so there you have it one year living in the abandoned ghost town of cerro gordo and what a beautiful year it was right now i'm sitting watching the sunset and you may notice that's not my typical sunset spot that's because today uh mother nature provided me with over six inches of fresh powder blocking my path to my typical sunset spot but that's okay you know what this year started with my plans being interrupted by snow and it seems like my year will end with my plans being interrupted by snow but the difference is i'm a lot more prepared now than it was then i'm a lot more confident now than it was then and i love that you know if i look back over this past year there was very specific goals that i had you know rebuild this cabin explore this mine get to this place but really the overarching goal was just to live a better life you know to develop more self-confidence you know self-sufficiency some new skills and just really live you know as opposed to just existing and i think if that was the overarching goal it's hard to fail and so i hope going into year two i can keep that in mind i do have some very specific goals i want to reopen the american hotel i cannot wait to share stories with many of you and i'm going to explore some minds find some cool treasure and do all sorts of other things but mainly i hope to continue developing that self-reliance and yeah just good life and as i sit here kind of reflecting over the past year the main thing i'm left with is gratitude gratitude for this town and every single person watching this video this year has brought me more meaning purpose adventure excitement and just true love of what i do than any other year of my life and it's brought more amazing people into my life than any other year and that's because of this channel so thank you guys very much i hope you enjoyed it thank you for sticking around and make sure to stick around because year two of living in an abandoned ghost town will start next week so until then i'm signing out i hope no matter what gets thrown in your way this week whether it's six inches of snow or anything else you take it in stride and make the best of it until then i'll be here you'll be there i'll see you all next [Music] week you

Channel: Ghost Town Living

Views: 773,009

Rating: 4.9739113 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: l4Iu3YB0pTs

Length: 66min 50sec (4010 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/HotIncrease]

This is like the 4th video I've seen of a hipster living alone in an abandoned ghost town, soon enough they're just going to become regular town towns

[u/a_dolf_please]

https://youtu.be/l4Iu3YB0pTs?t=433

only 7 minutes in, and the title has already been proven a fraud

[u/double-happiness]

I want to know how the hotel burnt down. I was waiting for him to say what caused the fire but that was noticeable by its omission, I thought.

[u/DikHeadedDragon]

Dang man. A year ago I thought for sure he'd bow out within a few months, let alone a year. Brutal winter too!! I did something similar in the San Gabriels a few years back. Lytle Creek area. There's tons a cool lore that comes out of those mountains. One that I really enjoy is about stage coach robbery. They're a dime a dozen all through out these mountains but this one I grew up looking for.

Anyways the story in a nutshell is, In 1853 a postal service that was transporting gold and other precious goods when it gets knicked by some Bandits. They kill the postal workers and over pack their horse with too much loot. They know they cant out run the law so they stashed it in a cave way up in the hills just before dying in a shoot out. Then, and of course, a massive rain storm comes through and buried the cave and its booty. It would reemerge in like the 1930's when a farmer kid was up way in the hills when he stumbled across it. He grabbed as much as he could, ran home and shocked the shit outta his dad. They rallied up an extraction team and wouldn't you fucking believe it. Goddamn massive rain storm comes ripping through and burring it yet again.

Still remaining there to this day as legend has it.

[u/Chafram]

Watch out for graboids. It's probably why it's a ghost town.

[u/tunatunatunatuna2]

I can't stand this channel.

[u/[deleted]]

Jeebus I wish this dudes videos would stop being posted. He made a horrible business decision. Suck it up and move on, not remotely "entertaining"...